A top investor who backed Hims and One Medical predicts 2020 will be the year prescription weight-loss treatments go direct-to-consumer
- Ambar Bhattacharyya is the managing director responsible for healthcare investing at Maverick Ventures, a VC firm that oversees $400 million.
- He anticipates 2020 will be the year we get access to prescription weight loss treatments online, in the same way companies have started offering birth control or hair-loss treatments.
- "The new category for 2020 that'll get all the focus will be weight loss," Bhattacharyya said.
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The way Ambar Bhattacharyya sees it, 2020 could be the year it gets a whole lot easier to get prescription help losing weight.
He said companies are likely to start offering the weight-loss treatments online, after a virtual doctor visit. It could look a lot like the way startups are prescribing birth control and erectile dysfunction treatments via the web, he said.
Bhattacharyya is the managing director responsible for healthcare investing at Maverick Ventures, a venture firm that oversees $400 million. Maverick is an investor in Hims, which sells treatments for hair loss and erectile dysfunction online.
Bhattacharyya said he expected medical treatments for weight loss to be the next big business for companies selling prescriptions online.
"The new category for 2020 that'll get all the focus will be weight loss," Bhattacharyya said.
Historically, prescription weight loss treatments haven't hit the market successfully, with doctors slow to prescribe them and insurers hesitant to cover them. The FDA has approved weight loss treatments meant to suppress your appetite, such as Belviq, Qsymia, and Saxenda.
The turn to weight loss could look a lot like the rollout companies like Hims and Roman have done in the hair-loss space, which historically has been a declining market. Both companies have made a big business shipping the treatments directly to patients' doors.
Ro, the company behind Roman, in December announced plans to offer a weight management service on its site. It's slated to launch in 2020.
In our conversation, Bhattacharyya also made several other 2020 predictions.
2020 will be a big IPO year for digital health companies
In 2019, at least five digital health companies managed to go public: Livongo, Change Healthcare, Phreesia, Health Catalyst, and SmileDirectClub.
In 2020, Bhattacharyya predicts that twice as many companies will venture onto the public market, with at least 10 going out, possibly even 12, he said.
"I think it'll be a busy year for investment bankers," Bhattacharyya said.
An app for every health need
In 2020, where you get your care will become a lot more fragmented, Bhattacharyya said. It's already starting to happen with startups like Curology that connect patients to dermatology treatments virtually or companies like Nurx that prescribe birth control online.
That'll in part be driven by the relative ease of building a startup that connects consumers to an online doctor's visit and prescription, with services like the online pharmacy Truepill and telemedicine companies like Enzyme.
"The barriers to launching a DTC brand are just so low in healthcare," Bhattacharyya said.
The changing way healthcare is using data
Bhattacharyya also predicts health data will start to be more integrated into how doctors care for patients. That is, information from medical records will go side by side with genetic data and insurance-claims information in a way doctors can use to make better decisions about a patient's treatment plan.
But that won't go as far as personal health records catching on, he said.
Bhattacharyya also sees the conversation around privacy leading to some changes in the way we think about consent when sharing health information. Ideally, he said, that'll be led by changes at the government level so it's consistent around the US rather than on a hospital-by-hospital basis.
Click here to read our conversations with 10 top healthcare VCs about their 2020 predictions.
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