Verily is planning “significant and focused growth” in 2021 after closing a $700 million funding round from investors including its parent company, and Google holding firm, Alphabet.
The capital injection will support wide-ranging plans for the new year that include several life sciences programmes in surgery, pathology and immunology, which would add to the digital ophthalmology joint venture it signed with Japan’s Santen in February.
Verily is also looking to accelerate a number of its key businesses, with the company calling out clinical research ecosystem Baseline, COVID-19 testing platform Healthy at Work and virtual clinic Onduo.
Another focus for the life sciences and health firm will be Coefficient, the commercial insurance venture it set up with Swiss Re in August to combine health tech with insurance and payment models.
Andrew Conrad, CEO and founder at Verily, said: “We’re humbled and excited about the opportunity to expand the scope and rapidly scale our products and services. With this new round of funding from our largest investors, they are strengthening their commitment to help expedite our original vision.
“2021 will be a year of significant and focused growth for Verily’s operations as we continue to drive innovation in our core programmes.”
It’s been a busy year for many of these programmes. Baseline was involved in screening and testing nearly two million people for COVID-19 across 351 sites and Healthy at Work was launched in June to help businesses and universities to reopen safely.
Meanwhile, the last 12 months have seen a refocusing at Onduo. Initially launched as a diabetes-focused joint venture with Sanofi in 2016, the French pharma company significantly scaled back its involvement in the firm last December, retaining just a small financial stake in it.
Nevertheless, Verily is bullish about the prospects for expanding Onduo’s virtual clinical model into new areas, and this year it added support for hypertension and general wellness.
In addition to Alphabet, supporters of Verily’s latest funding round also included Silver Lake, Temasek, and Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan.
Alphabet and other investors poured $700 million in funding into Verily last week. The company, which is Alphabet’s life sciences subsidiary, plans to pour some of the funds into supporting Covid-19 vaccine studies and programs for businesses.
– Cityblock Health, a transformative, value-based healthcare provider focused on improving healthcare outcomes for marginalized communities, today announced a $160M Series C round, bringing its total raised to $300M.
– Cityblock is a care delivery trailblazer working to right the injustices of a healthcare system that cycles vulnerable communities through frequent ER visits and hospital stays. Its tech-enabled model delivers primary care, behavioral care, and social services, virtually and in-person, to the Medicaid and lower-income Medicare beneficiary communities.
– Cityblock provides social services that address core
aspects of poverty in order to improve health outcomes, including access to
nutritious food and support to safely care for oneself.
Cityblock
Health, a Brooklyn, NY-based healthcare provider for lower-income
communities, announced today the completion of a $160 million Series C funding
round and a valuation of over $1 billion. New Cityblock investor General Catalyst
led the round, with participation from crossover investor Wellington Management
and support from major existing investors, including Kinnevik AB, Maverick
Ventures, Thrive Capital, Redpoint Ventures, and more. The investment round
brings Cityblock’s total equity funding to $300 million, as they look to grow
their footprint to democratize access to community-based integrated care in a
more than $1.3 trillion market.
Care That Meets You Where You Are
Spun out of Sidewalk Labs, an Alphabet Company in 2017 and anchored in a first partnership with EmblemHealth, Cityblock is a transformative, value-based healthcare provider focused on improving outcomes for Medicaid and lower-income Medicare beneficiaries. The company provides medical care (both primary care and complex specialty services), behavioral health, and social services to its members virtually, in their homes, in the community, and in its neighborhood hubs. Their model reflects an underlying philosophy that improving health outcomes and minimizing systemic healthcare inequities requires fundamentals that address the root effects of poverty, like having access to nutritious food or the ability to safely care for yourself and others.
Value-Based Care Model
Cityblock leverages a value-based model, instead of a
fee-for-service basis, like most healthcare providers. Cityblock splits the
cost savings that come from better outcomes with the healthcare payer. Cityblock’s
financial structure squarely aligns the health needs of its members to continuously
deliver patient-centric care.
Cityblock is powered by Commons a groundbreaking care delivery platform that brings together distributed community-based care teams, care delivery workflows, data feeds, and multimodal member interactions. It allows social workers, pharmacists, doctors, paramedics, and our virtual care teams to all come together on the same page in real-time. With each new market we enter, our technology reinforces our care model, allowing us to serve more members while ensuring consistently high quality, empathetic, and effective care.
Integrated Care Team
Cityblock’s integrated care teams include doctors, nurses,
advanced practice clinicians, behavioral health specialists, licensed clinical
social workers, and community health partners, and leverage close partnerships
with existing healthcare providers and community-based social services
organizations.
Today, Cityblock provides care to 70,000 members in Connecticut,
New York, Massachusetts, and Washington D.C., with high member engagement and
NPS scores of high 80s to 90s across its markets. Over the past year, Cityblock
members have seen reductions in in-patient hospital admission rates and
improvements in quality outcomes, keeping people healthier and driving down
costs across the board, while more than doubling membership and revenue,
year-over-year.
The Impact of COVID Has Magnified Health Disparities
According to Cityblock, the COVID-19 pandemic has
significantly magnified health disparities highlighting three fundamental
problems:
– Inequity of
America’s social infrastructure, including the legacy of systemic racism, has
created unacceptably disparate health outcomes
– Healthcare’s volume-based, fee-for-service payment model contributes
poor outcomes, especially for marginalized communities
– The models that
have to-date addressed key components of these challenges have not successfully
scaled.
Story of Cityblock Member Sonia
The story of Sonia, a Cityblock member, is featured in the blog post announcing the raise. Counted out and considered
a ‘nuisance’ by the healthcare system, Sonia was visiting the emergency room
several times a week for care and services, resulting in poor outcomes for the
health system and for herself. Cityblock enrolled Sonia in their high-risk
short-term housing program, placing her into a hotel during the peak of her
community’s Covid-19’s outbreak. As her trust in Cityblock grew, Sonia worked
with Cityblock and its community partners to secure permanent housing. Over the
course of two years, Sonia saw a 21% reduction in hospital use and a 24%
reduction in monthly costs, and has had zero ER visits since April 2020.
“The devastating impact of COVID-19 has been a painful
reminder of the vulnerability of lower-income communities and communities of
color,” said Iyah Romm, Cityblock Health co-founder and CEO. “We cannot turn a
blind eye to a healthcare system that cycles vulnerable communities through
frequent ER visits and hospital stays. We believe that new models of care
delivery, rooted in preventative care and augmented with social services, are
one major path forward to righting the injustices of our healthcare system.
This starts with listening to our members, extends through changing payment
models to create sustainability for primary care providers and building
technology to democratize access to the care models that we are building.”
Alphabet’s “moonshot” subsidiary X shared that it failed to find a single biomarker for depression and anxiety. But the company still plans to make its research, which included developing portable EEGs, available to the public.
Google’s sister company launched a program in California and other states to help route patients to nearby coronavirus testing. Dr. Vivian Lee, president of health platforms for Verily, shared lessons learned from that effort and Verily’s work with schools and businesses.
Alphabet’s healthcare subsidiary, Verily, will partner with Swiss Re Corporate Solutions to create a new stop-loss insurance company. The new entity, called Coefficient, will use data analytics to help self-funded companies manage unexpected areas of cost.
– Alphabet’s Verily has established a new subsidiary,
Coefficient, with a mission to create value by combining innovative health
technology solutions with new insurance and payment models. Verily is the
majority shareholder and Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, an established player in
the employer stop-loss market, has a minority stake in the new company.
– Coefficient will enter a segment of insurance called
employer stop-loss. Employer stop-loss typically protects self-funded employers
from unexpected and large health insurance claims.
Verily, an Alphabet company is announcing a new subsidiary, Coefficient Insurance Company, that will be backed by Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, the commercial insurance unit of the Swiss Re Group. Coefficient will combine innovative health technology solutions with novel insurance and payment models. It’s precision risk solution helps self-funded employers to control cost volatility through a data-driven model that is unique in the traditional employer stop-loss market. Employer stop-loss is a segment of commercial insurance that protects self-funded employers from unexpected and large employee health benefit claims by reimbursing employers for claims above a defined amount.
How Coefficient Works
Coefficient will leverage Verily’s core strengths integrating hardware, software, and data science and will also leverage Swiss Re Corporate Solutions’s risk knowledge, distribution capabilities, and reputation in the employer stop-loss market. Coefficient’s precision risk solution is designed to provide self-funded employers with more predictable benefit plan protection. It uses an analytics-based underwriting engine to identify unexpected areas of cost volatility and cover those exposures with more dynamic and precise insurance policy provisions. Over time, Coefficient plans to integrate Verily’s suite of health devices and tech-driven interventions for workers and dependents into its precision risk solution to improve health outcomes and control cost.
“Employers have been facing rising and increasingly unpredictable healthcare costs for years,” said Andy Conrad, CEO, Verily. “Coefficient is aimed at reducing blind spots and providing greater cost control mechanisms for self-funded employers, and we expect that partnering with Swiss Re Corporate Solutions will help us to better develop and distribute our precision risk solution to the employer stop-loss market. Over time, we look forward to integrating Coefficient with Verily’s employer health solutions, including mobile health devices and innovative care management programs, in order to align payment models with better health outcomes.”
Swiss Re
Corporate Solutions has agreed to make a minority investment in Coefficient,
subject to the satisfaction of certain closing conditions including regulatory
approvals. In connection with this investment, Ivan Gonzalez, CEO North
America, Swiss Re Corporate Solutions, is expected to join the Coefficient
Board of Directors upon closing.
Verily has expedite the COVID-19 testing with a new lab-based at South San Francisco. The lab will use the technology from Thermo Fisher Scientific’s TaqPath test kit that has received the US FDA’s EUA to test COVID-19
Verily has submitted a EUA for an adaptation of the TaqPath test to use in testing pooled patient specimens. Pooling is expected to enable our clinical lab to increase our testing capacity even further while maintaining a high level of overall test performance.
Additionally, the company has verified the Roche Elecsys anti-SARS-CoV-2 Ab test and plans to implement additional tests in our lab
Click here to read full press release/ article | Ref: Verily | Image: The Business Journal
CityBlock Health, a company building out healthcare services for low-income communities, raised $53.5 million in a series B extension. The company plans to use the funds to expand its clinical programs and further develop its technology.
