LAS VEGAS—The second day of HLTH kicked off with main-stage speakers from Google, LinkedIn, McKesson and Amazon.
It's another busy day of sessions, meetings, interviews and walking the show floor, but we still found time to check out the puppy park.
The art of the pitch: How payers, employers are cutting through the noise
It's no secret that a major component of HLTH is emerging startups and tech innovators pitching their services and tools to some of healthcare's biggest names.
A panel on Monday afternoon aimed to provide them with some guidance on how to best make those proposals stand out. Heather Dlugolenski, SVP and U.S. commercial strategy officer at Cigna Healthcare, said during the session that it doesn't take much before pitch meetings start to feel like white noise.
But companies that get down to the brass tacks quickly and efficiently are more likely to make an impression, she said. Come prepared with most compelling, singular thing in the value proposition, she said.
Henry Ting, chief health officer for Delta Air Lines, said doing your homework is also a crucial piece to the puzzle. Coming to a meeting prepared and understanding the company that you're pitching will make it far easier to state your case.
"If you get a meeting with one of us, I hope you will take some time to really try to understand what our needs are, what problem we're trying to solve," he said.
Best Buy Health to start selling prescription medical devices
Best Buy will start selling prescription continuous glucose monitoring systems (CGMs), including the DexCom G7 continuous CGM system, through its website.
It marks the retailer's first foray into selling prescription-based medical devices.
The company is working with virtual care platform Wheel and HealthDyne, a pharmacy technology provider, The products will be available at Wellness.BestBuyHealth.com. Leveraging the Salesforce platform, Best Buy is selling glucose monitors via a site powered by Commerce Cloud. Once a patient is approved for a prescription medical device, the prescription will then be processed by HealthDyne and the device will be sent to paients' homes, the company said.
The CDC reports that more than 10% of the U.S. population has diabetes.With the demand for CGM growing over the past few years, using these devices means fewer fingersticks, real-time glucose monitoring and the ability to make smarter decisions about controlling diabetes.
Best Buy Health's goal is to soon allow those with an existing CGM prescription from their own physician to be able to upload that prescription into their profile and have the device sent to them.
The company said it will not be able to accept insurance payment for CGM systems at launch, but customers with HSA/FSA/HRA funds may be able to be reimbursed for their purchase.
Read the full story at Fierce Medtech.
DUOS launches AI to match older adults with needed resources
Senior benefits navigation startup DUOS rolled out a new product leveraging artificial intelligence to match older adults with key resources ranging from primary care to transportation.
DUOS+AI’s conversational interface uses a large language model (LLM) that enables the platform to recommend optimal services based on the unique social determinants of health (SDOH) and care navigation needs of the older adult, caregiver, or care manager.
DUOS’ digital app serves both members and care manager teams in identifying needs rooted in social determinants of health and drives interventions to resolve those needs. DUOS+AI triages member’s needs and matches them with impactful action such as relevant benefits, resources, and content. DUOS’ application for phone-based member support agents is fully integrated with DUOS’ member-facing digital app, employing the same underlying AI, to optimize support and communication with members. All digital and virtual interactions feed back into the system, enhancing needs identification and resolution.
Mendel rolls out AI-copilot for healthcare and life sciences
Mendel, a clinical artificial intelligence technology company, launched Hypercube, an AI-copilot that enables life sciences and healthcare to interact with vast patient data seamlessly. The technology is designed to identify patients for trials and answer research questions, according to the company.
Hypercube delivers quick insights into patient data and can answer previously unanswerable questions, according to the company.
The current approach of leveraging AI in health data relies solely on machine learning techniques like neural networks and large language models (LLMs). However, this approach is inadequate for clinical applications because of its inability to discern the nuances of clinical language and susceptibility to hallucinations (unpredictable errors or inaccuracies).
Hypercube fills this void and can clinically reason through a proprietary hybrid approach that combines large language modeling with symbolic AI. The solution opens complex cohort analysis to the business user through plain English questions, while providing advanced users like data scientists query visualization and programmatic access to run analyses – enabling a broad variety of use cases across the organization.