B.well Connected Health, maker of a platform unifying patient data, picked up an additional investment from nonprofit research institute RTI International as the company expands its reach into the pharma and life sciences industries.
Financial details of the equity investment were not disclosed.
RTI International also is partnering with the health tech company to enable its RTI Health Solutions business unit to advance the use of technology and data to maximize impact on patient outcomes, executives at the research organization said. RTI Health Solutions provides consulting and research expertise to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics and medical device companies.
"These capabilities will enable all RTI's health businesses to further incorporate patient-level real-world data (RWD) into their research to provide clients with meaningful insights into changes, trends and causal relationships over time," executives said.
By moving into the life sciences sector, b.well Connected Health can now reach customers who historically have not been able to leverage direct-to-consumer pathways, Kristen Valdes, founder and CEO of b.well Connected Health, told Fierce Healthcare on the sidelines of the J. P. Morgan Health Care Conference last month.
"The partnership allows our customers to transform the end-to-end patient journeys from R&D through postlaunch drug support with informed patient consent," she said.
The company's strategic partnership with RTI International introduces a new approach to research in the pharma and life sciences industry," Valdes noted. "With recent regulations granting all Americans access to their medical data, we have an exciting pathway to expedite recruitment and broaden research populations, all directed by consumers," she said.
B.well's digital infrastructure and hybrid interoperability capabilities can pave the way to transform the pharma and life sciences industry with a new approach, she noted.
A Fierce Healthcare Fierce 15 honoree in 2022, b.well aims to give consumers one-stop, mobile access to all their health data. The company developed a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR)-enabled digital platform that unifies fragmented healthcare data and services into personalized digital experiences. This is powered by b.well's 60,000 live, consumer-mediated data connections, which include payer and provider application programming interfaces (APIs), health information networks (HINs), connected devices and wearables, labs and pharmacies.
The technology can work as a white-labeled application or integration into existing investments.
B.well works to unify a patient’s data by connecting a variety of stakeholders, including doctors, pharmacies and labs, along with the patient's own apps and devices, in one platform. It also provides personalized content that guides patients to take specific actions, harnessing behavioral psychology and game theory to engage the consumer in their health journey.
RTI Health Solutions, part of RTI International, provides consulting and research expertise to pharmaceutical, biotechnology, diagnostics and medical device companies. The research organization also announced an investment in BEKhealth, an AI-powered chart abstraction and patient-matching platform that integrates electronic health records (EHR) data to rapidly identify clinically qualified participants for clinical research.
"These healthcare technology investments will enable RTI to efficiently identify the right patients and gather deeper insights through integrated evidence generation across multiple data sources," Kelly Hollis, senior vice president, patient centered outcomes research at RTI Health Solutions, said in a statement. "Through these partnerships, RTI will be able to connect real-time, real-world data with patient-provided insights to illuminate the full picture of the patient experience and patient journey with the goal of improving healthcare decision making."
B.well has built its business working with health plans, health systems and employers. At HLTH 2023, biometric identity verification company Clear unveiled a partnership with b.well to embed its tech to help patients better access and control their health data with one account. The feature is aimed at reducing the need for repetitive log-ins.
The company also partners with Samsung to give Galaxy smartphone users control over their longitudinal health records and connect with providers through the Samsung Health app.
Valdes, a former executive at UnitedHealthcare, was motivated to start b.well after her own personal experiences with a fragmented medical system. Her daughter, who struggles with an autoimmune disorder, suffered a near-fatal medical error because two electronic health record systems were not connected to one another.
"She was given a routine prescription by a pediatrician and it conflicted with a diagnosis sitting in a specialist system in another health system," Valdes told Fierce Healthcare in an interview in 2022.
"I knew how to navigate the healthcare system. I live in Baltimore among some of the top academic medical centers in the world and it still took me seven and a half years to find her diagnosis and I was the one who found it," Valdes said. "It was impossible for me to navigate the system and I was treated as the mom who knew a little too much about healthcare trying to find something wrong with this otherwise 'perfectly healthy' child."
That was a wake-up call that propelled Valdes to leave her position at United Healthcare to start b.well, which launched in 2016.
"I’m attempting to do what I think consumers and families need, which is one singular location to manage all of their healthcare in one place and to do the hard part for them—collect, aggregate and make sense of their medical records but give them the ability to share them with whoever they choose," Valdes told Fierce Healthcare in 2022.
Advances in cloud technology and application programming interface (API) development will enable more data to be unified, Valdes said during the JPM interview.
"What you're going to see from b.well in 2025 is a whole series of big announcements where we're going to be bringing pretty big behemoths and segments that never talked to each other before together into unified experiences," she said.
She added, "There's this cliché term in healthcare: 'We meet people where they are.' No, we don't, we make them come to us. We make them come like. My daughter has 26 clinical patient portals. None of them are accurate. None of them talk to each other. Her insurance changes on average every two and a half years, just like everybody else in this country. Her data is everywhere, and that doesn't include her lab and her pharmacy and her radiology."
The expansion into the life sciences sector marks a major milestone for b.well.
The company's capabilities apply nicely into the challenges of life sciences and research companies, Valdes said. The company can work with life sciences companies to develop companion apps, she noted.
"There are a ton of companion applications for medications and drugs to try to manage the safety and efficacy of medications, and they're not highly utilized. Companion apps do not have the same challenges as a lot of portals in healthcare, where they're not personalized for an individual and they don't nudge and prompt people. We're tailor-made for that as we have higher engagement rates than anyone out there," she noted.
The partnership will RTI International incorporates insights from patient data in real-world evidence and observational studies and can help broaden diversity in research populations for studies designed to improve public health awareness and outcomes at the state and national level.
"Historically, observational research and clinical trials have been done through recruitment and through providers and required a lot of education, but we can now actually take those opportunities and bring them direct to consumers by simply asking consumers the question, 'If you or your family members could be matched to a research study, you could be compensated for your time, but basically to help support and inform public health initiatives.' We've been actually surprised by the number of people who want to respond and who want to participate to make our healthcare system better," Valdes said.
The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) is taking steps to increase racial and ethnic diversity in clinical trials given that 20% of drugs have a variation in responses across ethnic groups, yet 75% of clinical trial participants are white while only 11% are Hispanic and fewer than 10% are Black and Asian, according to 2020 data from the FDA.
"We’re committed to ensuring that all patients have a seat at the table and that we eliminate the black box of how our health data is transacted. RTI is an incredible, like-minded partner that we are proud to partner with," Valdes said.