DIGITAL HEALTH BRIEFING: Oscar Health surpasses $3 billion valuation - Apple Health app adds 27 more hospitals - Lyft expands its NEMT footprint

Welcome to Digital Health Briefing, the newsletter providing the latest news, data, and insight on how digital technology is disrupting the healthcare ecosystem, produced by Business Insider Intelligence.

Sign up and receive Digital Health Briefing free to your inbox.

Have feedback? We'd like to hear from you. Write me at: lbeaver@businessinsider.com

OSCAR HEALTH SURPASSES $3 BILLION VALUATION, DRIVEN BY EMPHASIS ON DIGITAL SOLUTIONS: US-based insurtech Oscar Health secured a $165 million funding round led by Brian Singerman and Founders Fund, with participation from 8VC, Google's health-focused sister company Verily Life Sciences, and Fidelity, among others. This brings the company's total funding to $892 million, and a reported valuation of over $3 billion, according to CNBC sources. Oscar will use the funding to develop its operations, forming new partnerships with insurers including Cleveland Clinic, Humana, and AXA. Additionally, Oscar plans to expand into Texas, Ohio, and New Jersey in 2018.

Oscar's growth is driven by its ability to leverage virtual services that promote convenience and encourage user engagement, a key part of the consumerization of healthcare. In 2017, around two-thirds of Oscar's customers' interactions were virtual. For example, Oscar's Concierge team was accessed by 46% of Oscar members, its telemedicine service was used by 25% of customers, and the Care Router service - a yellow pages for finding physicians and booking appointments - was accessed by 45% of its members. These services aim to provide affordable care in place of more expensive healthcare services like emergency room visits.

Oscar uses the data collected from these virtual services to expand its customer base and keep its members happy. Data from the virtual visits is made available to the Concierge team and providers, which in turn helps them to make improvements to their services. These improvements can make services more appealing to potential and existing customers, creating a virtuous cycle, Oscar product and technology communications manager Liz Robau said earlier this year.

Providers and health systems are keen to join forces with tech-backed insurers like Oscar because the company helps to drive patients to its partners. In each city Oscar expands to, it partners with only a few health systems. As consumers, particularly those in the millennial age bracket (people born between 1977 and 2000) increasingly seek out alternative modes of healthcare delivery, such as telehealth, Oscar can direct its engaged customers to partner hospitals and clinics, driving up usage and revenue rates at these health systems.

APPLE REVEALS MORE INFORMATION ABOUT HOSPITALS USING ITS HEALTH RECORDS SERVICE: An additional 27 health systems are ready to use Apple's updated Health app to push electronic health record (EHR) notifications to iPhone users, bringing the total number of partnered health systems to 39, the company announced on Thursday. Apple introduced the new service on January 24, as a part of a beta test for its iPhone operating system update to iOS 11.3, which has been rolled out to iPhone users. Eligible consumers will be able to store and share their EHRs with physicians, vastly improving patient insight and increasing their control over their own health data. Partnered hospitals can also push health record notifications to eligible consumers' phones, including medications, immunizations, lab results, and vitals, providing better transparency of care. The Health app update is an important step in solving the interoperability issues that plague the EHR market. EHRs are often held by the department the patient received care in, and are difficult to share between departments let alone organizations, which can lead to costly duplicate tests and procedures. Just 20% of US health systems use EHR data from outside sources, according to Health Affairs. Moreover, although some health systems already provide their patients with a way to view their EHRs through an app, Apple's app will across systems.

Apple

LYFT EXPANDS MEDICAL TRANSPORT REACH: Lyft has partnered with Acuity Link to expand its non-emergency medical transport (NEMT) offering, according to Healthcare Dive. Acuity Link's dashboard organizes hospital transport for varying levels of care, including critical ambulance transport and outpatient transportation. It will now include Lyft as a transport option.

This is the most recent effort by Lyft to expand its healthcare footprint:

• Earlier this month, the company partnered with health IT company Allscripts, and in February it partnered with EHR company Hitch Health.
• Further, there's already a substantial list of healthcare organizations that have access to the Lyft Concierge API, including American Medical Response, American Logistics Company, Carelinx, GoGo Grandparent, and One Call.

Lyft isn't the only ride-sharing platform moving into health. Uber announced its health platform at the beginning of March. Healthcare organizations are viewing Lyft's and Uber's moves into NEMT as an opportunity to overcome the massive annual loss of revenue caused by missed appointments. In the US, missed appointments cost healthcare providers as much as $150 billion each year, with no-show rates as high as 30%, according to SCI Solutions. It's worth noting that while Uber and Lyft are actively striving to increase their health audience, it's not yet clear whether ride-sharing has a significant, or positive, impact on appointment no-shows, according to a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine.

FDA APPROVES GLUCOSE MONITORING DEVICE, OPENS PATHWAY FOR SIMILAR DEVICES: On Tuesday, the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved DexCom's G6, the first fully interoperable continuous glucose monitoring (CGM) device system that doesn't require patient calibration. This means that people with diabetes can continuously monitor their blood levels without having to repeatedly use painful finger sticks to check the reading. The device, which attaches to the user's stomach, automatically sends glucose readings to a DexCom receiver or a compatible smart device every five minutes. Patients can also personalize their alerts to warn them when their blood sugar levels are getting low. The approval was based on two clinical trials of the device and lowers the barrier of entry for other similar devices, by establishing criteria that classify these systems as moderate risk medical devices, the FDA announced. The benefit of continuous monitoring devices is that they provide consumers and physicians with a trendline of their health, resulting in a fuller picture of the patient's status, rather than multiple snapshots of their health throughout the day. Streamlining the approval of continuous monitoring devices will also encourage better self-monitoring, since users will be able to tell which behaviors negatively and positively affect their blood sugar levels, potentially leading to fewer clinical visits.

IN OTHER NEWS:

• Bigfoot Biomedical, a startup that develops AI-powered solutions for people with diabetes, raised $55 million in funding in its recent Series B round, MobiHealthNews reports. The company is set to announce a trial in late 2018 that will lay the groundwork for submitting its product to the FDA.
• Nokia will cut 353 staff in Finland as a part of its global cost-savings plan, down from the reported 425 jobs announced in February this year, according to Reuters. The majority of staff will come from its Network business, and 70 staff will come from its Technologies unit, which includes the Nokia's health business.