Allara raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by GV. The startup offers membership-based virtual services to treat women’s chronic hormonal conditions, such as PCOS and endometriosis. CEO Rachel Blank — former executive at Ro and investor at General Catalyst — founded the company partly due to the difficulty she experienced arriving at her own PCOS diagnosis.

Amazon Pharmacy is now offering a drone delivery service for prescription medications in College Station, Texas. The service is free and allows patients to receive their medications within 60 minutes.

As part of the Heard at HLTH video series, MedCity News Editor in Chief Arundhati Parmar and Senior Reporter Katie Adams interviewed healthcare executives about innovations in health tech at HLTH 2023 in Las Vegas earlier this month.

Mass General Brigham launched a program this month in collaboration with behavioral health medical group Concert Health. Under the program, more than 400 Mass General primary care providers can refer their patients to Concert. The health system’s goal is to increase patients’ access to diagnoses and treatment for mild to moderate behavioral health issues — particularly for Medicaid patients, who are the most underserved.

At HLTH, Shaun Miller — Cedars-Sinai’s chief medical information officer — pointed out one thing he thinks healthcare AI companies haven’t quite gotten right yet. He said he would “really like there to be a lot more recognition around the personalization of AI and the ability for technology to understand that not every clinician is the same.”

Rite Aid filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection on Sunday amid decreasing sales, billions of dollars in debt and more than a thousand lawsuits claiming the chain filled illegal prescriptions for opioids. In order for the company to get back on its feet, experts say it will have to start acting more like its competitors, such as Walgreens and CVS, by leaning more into care delivery, forging strong payer partnerships, and improving its digital offerings.

In a preview before the official announcement at HLTH last week, Microsoft executives and its hospital customers shared use cases of how its suite of AI tools can be used by health systems to improve healthcare delivery and alleviate provider burnout.

At HLTH, Mayo Clinic Platform President John Halamka gave a window into how his health system is mitigating generative AI risks. Some of the measures Mayo is taking include running analyses on how well algorithms perform across various subgroups and training models only on internal de-identified data.

Hospital M&A activity has been returning to pre-pandemic levels this year, according to a new report. There were 18 M&A transactions in Q3, compared to seven in Q3 2021 and 10 in Q3 of last year. The reason why M&A activity is regaining its momentum is because hospitals are seeking partnerships to grow and protect their long-term financial sustainability — the report found financial distress was the driving factor behind nearly 40% of deals announced during Q3.

This year’s HLTH conference brought a bevy of news announcements — from partnerships to new product features to acquisitions and more. In this list, MedCity News compiled short summaries for 11 of the conference’s most notable announcements.

The FDA’s digital health advisory committee will discuss technologies such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, virtual reality, and digital therapeutics as well as topics like decentralized clinical trials and patient-generated health data. Committee member nominations are due in December.

The last few years, both during and after the pandemic, have been turbulent times for healthcare providers and patients alike. For now, although it appears that healthcare staffing shortages will continue, providers are not without practical strategies for attracting and retaining talent.

If you could only do one thing to improve the health of children in the U.S., it would have to be in the behavioral health sphere, Nemours Children’s Health CEO Lawrence Moss declared at HLTH. The state of youth mental health has reached a crisis point in the U.S., and Moss’ health system is working hard to address this. Some of its efforts include embedding behavioral health into primary care and deploying behavioral health workers in schools.

At the HLTH conference last week, MedCity News’ editorial team interviewed 11 health leaders from a variety of organizations to get a sense of which areas within healthcare will see consolidation over the next 12 months.

At HLTH 2023, I had dozens of conversations with providers, digital health investors, startup CEOs and other players in the healthcare industry. When I got home, I compiled seven refreshingly honest takes I heard from them while at the conference.

A recent webinar sponsored by AVIA Health and Seamless MD examined how health systems use remote patient monitoring beyond the usual chronic condition applications, including surgical prep and recovery, women’s health, and more.

Health tech to support care for seniors and track the progression of conditions such as Parkinson’s disease and heart failure were on display at HLTH 2023. The National Institute on Aging also added a startup boot camp leading up to HLTH.

At HLTH, Bessemer investors Sofia Guerra and Steve Kraus detailed four predictions about where they think the digital health world is headed in 2024. One of these was that “services-as-software” will emerge as a new category of healthcare AI. Another was that some healthcare technology vendors will have to rethink their distribution models and rely on indirect monetization strategies.

Walmart’s relationship with Included Health dates back to 2016 when its previous incarnation – Doctor on Demand – began providing virtual urgent care services to Walmart employees in three states. Nearly eight years later, the San Francisco company continues to be the only partner charged with delivering virtual primary care to almost 1 million people in 49 states.

Noom is now offering Noom Med to employers. The program is intended for patients who need more clinical support in their weight loss journey. It offers access to a clinician and medications, including GLP-1s.

At HLTH, General Catalyst Principal Candace Richardson discussed some of the questions she frequently asks startups during investment meetings. Some of these include “Do you stratify your outcomes data by different populations to ensure your model works well for everyone?” and “Is serving Medicaid populations on your roadmap?”

To address the growing physician shortage, some people argue that the scope of practice should be expanded for skilled healthcare professionals like nurse practitioners and pharmacists. American Medical Association President Dr. Jesse Ehrenfeld said this is a “terrible idea.” He argued that throwing other professionals into physicians’ roles will have poor ramifications of patient safety. In his view, the industry should focus on uplifting strong interprofessional care teams.

Main Street Health announced the close of a $315 funding round at HLTH — some of the investors included UnitedHealthcare, Humana, Elevance, Centene and CVS. The startup, which scales value-based care in rural areas for both Medicare Advantage and original Medicare patients, also announced that it is expanding to 26 states.

Spring Health and Highmark Health are collaborating to launch Mental Well-Being, a solution that offers therapy, medication and other services for some Highmark members.

The report maps out the health tech sector’s current position in the innovation hype cycle, which business models are most resilient, and how the industry can move out of the trough of disillusionment. It also offered predictions for health tech trends in 2024.

Merith Basey, executive director of Patients For Affordable Drugs, believes the Medicare price negotiation program is here to stay, no matter who is president and no matter how many Big Pharma players file lawsuits. Her reasoning? Every other high income nation has been negotiating prices with drugmakers for years, and the program is widely popular in the U.S. among pretty much everyone who isn’t a pharma company, she said during a session at Engage at HLTH.

Endless digital health solutions have emerged over the last few years. But eventually, they’ll have to consolidate — and that’s part of the cycle, investors said during a panel discussion on Sunday.

Healthcare technology experts have confidence that the industry will put the right guardrails up around LLMs as it continues to develop and deploy these AI tools, they said Sunday during a panel discussion at Engage at HLTH.

The most successful implementations of digital solutions offer value propositions on both sides of the equation — they create value for the patient and family, while also making the clinician’s job easier and more enjoyable by saving time and eliminating ancillary duties.

The digital health sector’s quarterly investment trends seem to be stabilizing in 2023, according to a new report from Rock Health. The report noted investors are shifting their focus away from pandemic-era categories like telehealth and pharmaceutical R&D catalysts — instead, they’re interested in startups creating products for disease treatment, the improvement of nonclinical workflows and the enablement of value-based care.