The Blockchain 50 | Mask Confusion | Doximity Acquires Amion

Plus: Doctors in Canada can prescribe free passes to national parks for patients

While the word "blockchain" may most often be associated with cryptocurrency, this year’s Forbes Blockchain 50 list showed that some of the world’s largest companies are using the technology to help save time and money — and it’s got nothing to do with Bitcoin. Take Anthem, one of the country’s largest health insurers, with $137 billion in revenues in 2021. It’s using blockchain to speed up the arcane administrative process known as “coordination of benefits,” which determines one’s primary insurer. Through a shared ledger with Health Care Service Corporation for certain Medicaid members in Texas, the companies now make this determination in minutes or hours instead of weeks or  months. 

Big hospital systems are also looking to blockchain as a way to speed up time-consuming administrative processes. In 2019, Providence, a not-for-profit Catholic health system, acquired Seattle health-tech startup Lumedic to tackle “prior authorization” — when a doctor needs to check with a patient’s insurer to ensure certain surgeries or medications will be covered. In 2021, 16 of Providence’s hospitals and four clinics across Washington, Montana and Oregon were using its shared ledger to speed up prior authorization processing time from days to hours. Check out the full list here. 

Doximity, which began as a social network for doctors, announced Tuesday it will acquire the on-call doctor scheduling company Amion, as it looks to grow its portfolio of digital tools for medical professionals. Stuart Karon founded Boston-based Amion in 1998 to help his wife Jodi Wenger, a physician who was a chief pediatric resident at the time, build out on-call schedules for her team. Amion (the name comes from a doctor asking the question Am I On?) currently manages nearly 200,000 physician schedules across thousands of hospitals. The deal includes $53.5 million in cash plus the possibility of up to $29 million in earnouts and equity compensation over four years.

Deals Of The Week

Telehealth: As a general rule, we don’t include deals where the terms aren’t disclosed. Today we’re making an exception for the Thirty Madison merger with Nurx, to explore some of the numbers we do know. Telehealth company Thirty Madison, which has raised $210 million, was valued at $1 billion in its latest funding round in June 2021. At that time, Bloomberg reported 1Q21 sales “surpassed an annual run-rate of $100 million.” In August 2020, birth control delivery startup Nurx CEO Varsha Rao told TechCrunch the company was operating at a $150 million annual run rate. Nurx, which has not publicly disclosed a valuation, has raised $110 million. The combined company expects to do $300 million in revenue in 2022, according to the press release. Here we’ve got two companies with similar revenues merging in a situation where neither has a ton of extra cash. So who’s taking the haircut? “While we’re not able to share deal terms, Thirty Madison and Nurx both saw the value in coming together this way and how Thirty Madison’s care model could help accelerate our combined business,” a spokesperson said. 

9-Figure Biopharma: Drug discovery company Ventus Therapeutics raised a $140 million Series C co-led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and RA Capital Management. Ventus uses machine learning to try and identify small molecule therapeutics for targets “previously considered undruggable.” Its lead program, known as VENT-01, is looking to inhibit an inflammatory pathway that's a target for multiple diseases.

Home Health: ConcertoCare, which provides home-based care for seniors, raised a $105 million Series B round led by Wells Fargo Strategic Capital. The company combines software, connected devices and virtual and in-patient care from doctors, nurses, pharmacists, health coaches, and social workers. 

Doudna On Board: Investment firm Sixth Street announced this week that Nobel Prize winning chemist Jennifer Doudna will become its chief science advisor. Doudna, who leads a lab at UC Berkeley, is a scientific cofounder of several CRISPR-based gene editing companies, including Intellia Therapeutics, Caribou Biosciences, Scribe Therapeutics, Editas Medicines and Mammoth Biosciences. In her new role, Doudna will “provide advice on the latest developments in CRISPR-related technology, ethics, and regulation,” according to the press release.

Noteworthy

The economic toll of the opioid epidemic is $1.3 trillion per year and rising. 

Amazon Care is expanding in-person healthcare services to more than 20 new cities in 2022.

Cigna reported $1.1 billion net income for the fourth quarter of 2020 boosted by its subsidiary Evernorth’s pharmacy performance. 

With super rapid genome sequencing, scientists at Stanford analyzed the full genome of a 3-month-old patient within eight and a half hours to scan for mutations associated with epilepsy.

Coronavirus Updates

Many states have been lifting their mask mandates in recent days, such as New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. But that discussion seems largely disconnected from the advice being given out by public health officials. CDC director Rochelle Walensky, for instance, said today that her agency still recommends masking in areas with high Covid-19 transmission, which is pretty much most of the country right now. She did note, however, that many states announcing their mask mandates are going away are doing so in a phased manner, with some mandates not moving towards next month. “These decisions are going to have to be made at the local level,” she said.

Still, the disconnect between the actions of politicians and public health officials has made things tough for ordinary folks to figure out how best to navigate this phase of the pandemic. In a new Pew Research poll released today, 60% of Americans said that changes in public health guidance “made me feel confused.” While a majority of poll respondents understood that some changes are due to updates in scientific understanding, they still make people “less confident.” That shows in the general feelings towards public health officials like those at the CDC: only 50% say that they are doing an “excellent” or “good job” on Covid-19, down from 60% in August and 79% in March 2020. 

In other coronavirus news:

CVS reported more than $1 billion in quarterly profits thanks in part to a rush of customers being vaccinated against Covid-19 or being tested for the virus. 

Sweden lifted almost all of its pandemic restrictions and ended mass testing for the virus, joining a growing list of countries relaxing Covid protocols despite high numbers of infections.

Truck drivers protesting Canada’s Covid-19 vaccine rules continued to partially block the busy Ambassador Bridge linking the United States and Canada for a second day Tuesday evening.

As Covid-19 infections plummet nationwide, pressure has also eased on the country’s intensive care units in recent weeks, with hospitals reporting more free ICU beds and Covid patients taking up fewer spaces.

Across Forbes

• At Least 40 Starlink Satellites Launched By SpaceX Last Week Have Been Destroyed By Geomagnetic Storm

• This Under 30 Startup Just Raised $136 Million To Expand Its Radar Satellite Constellation

• Flexport Is Silicon Valley’s Solution To The Supply Chain Mess—Why Do Insiders Hope It Sinks?

What Else We Are Reading

• What a bottle of ivermectin reveals about the shadowy world of COVID telemedicine (NPR)

• ‘Good, not great’: Some long Covid patients see their symptoms improve, but full recovery is elusive (Stat)

• Francis Collins on COVID-19 politics: ‘The culture war is literally killing people’ (Religion News)