As part of their Healthcare Disruptive Technologies and Innovations (HCDT&I) Series, Credit Suisse https://www.credit-suisse.com hosted Joe Brennan, Founder of Moonshot Health Consulting https://www.moonshot-health.com, a consulting firm focused exclusively on telehealth for a virtual meeting with a small group of investors.
Mr. Brennan views the ongoing consolidation in digital health as highly beneficial to the consumer and the overall healthcare system. Specifically, Teladoc’s acquisition of Livongo has been one of the most important transactions thus far, as it allows Teladoc to enter an increasingly important chronic disease management/behavioral change market.
He sees the Cigna/MDLive transaction as being the beginning of what looks to be a virtual-first or virtual-only health plan. However, MDLive not only works with Cigna, but also has a range of other health plan customers, who Mr. Brennan believes are unlikely to continue working with MDLive once it is owned by Cigna. Finally, he views the Grand Rounds/Doctor on Demand merger as creating a unique opportunity to solve the problem of navigation.
With respect to Amazon, Mr. Brennan believes this time, the e-commerce giant’s entrance into healthcare is different. All of the pieces Amazon has compiled presents a real opportunity to become appealing to employers.
For example, the components of Amazon Pharmacy/PillPack, Amazon Alexa (which has HIPAA-compliant capabilities), the Amazon Halo wearable device with health & wellness tracking) combined with Amazon Care brings together an array of components to help consumers better manage their care and become more engaged with their health.
If Amazon is able to figure out the provider portion of healthcare, Mr. Brennan believes Amazon will be successful as long as they are able to show improvement in financial/clinical outcomes to employers.
Also, Mr. Brennan notes that Epic is putting a high degree of focus on improving their telehealth capability with the EHR. By adding multi-party capabilities, the ability for a provider to simply send a link to the patient/family member (i.e., without any other downloads), and the overall focus that Epic has put into the Epic video client is starting to show its benefits. Ultimately, when things settle down, Mr. Brennan believes that Epic EHR clients are most likely to go with the Epic-native telehealth solution.
With respect to Microsoft Teams, Mr. Brennan notes that since December 2020, Microsoft has been requiring multiple tools to run the telehealth offering. However, some hospitals/health systems do not have the appetite to make further investments into Microsoft products in order to run teams as part of a telehealth offering.
Finally Zoom has become much more competitive in the provider telehealth market relative to just six months ago. For Epic customers, using context aware linking, a link to a Zoom video session can be placed in an Epic appointment, enabling users to easily use Zoom and the Epic EHR in a streamlined side-by-side workflow.
For information on Credit Suisse’s takeaways from the meeting hosted with Mr. Brennan in September 2020 titled Taking the Pulse of Current Telehealth Market Landscape-An Expert Shares His Views, or to provide information, news, or have questions, email Jailendra Singh at Jailendra.singh@credit-suisse.com or call 212-325-8121.