Buoy Health's five new partners, IBM and Broad Institute's three-year disease prediction project, and more digital health deals

Also: Health at Hand signs on with Allianz Care; Sutter Health taps Ada Health for personalized guidance.
By Dave Muoio
04:08 pm
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Thanks to some new strategic agreements, online healthcare chatbot Buoy Health’s Corporate Health and Benefits program will now include specialized knowledge and services support from five new partners. Specifically, Workit Health will be providing addiction treatment support, Hinge Health will help users manage chronic pain, LetsGetChecked will assist general self-testing, Healthcare Bluebook will offer healthcare price and quality information and CirrusMD will connect users directly to a dedicated physician.

“Through the Buoy Health and Corporate Benefits program employees can manage their health and take control over their healthcare options from navigating symptoms to recommended next steps to connecting with experts,” Buoy Health CEO Dr. Andrew Le said in a statement. “Partnering with leading health solution vendors gives employees direct access to very specialized areas of healthcare through the Buoy platform, making it a one-stop shop for self-care and long-term chronic care. It's a robust Health and Corporate Benefits program that fosters a healthier and happier workforce.”

MENA region telehealth provider Health at Hand has signed a new contract with Allianz Care that will bring its services to hundreds of thousands of insured patients. The telehealth product will be delivered through a white-labelled app for Allianz Care patients, and will be accessible 24-7 with no copay.

“This announcement is a real inflection point for primary healthcare in the MENA region, where payers are desperately seeking viable, cost-containment solutions, as loss ratios increase and health insurance inflation spirals out of control,” Health at Hand CEO and founder Charlier Barlow said in a statement. “It is a huge endorsement for Health at Hand that we have been selected by Allianz Care, Allianz Partners’ international health brand, as their regional telehealth partner, and we are delighted to be associated with such a reputable group”.

IBM and the Broad Institute fortified their existing relationship with a new three-year project focused on cardiovascular disease prediction. The groups will employ genomics, artificial intelligence and biobank data from hospitals and EHRs to develop genetic risk scores clinicians can use to anticipate the onset of urgent heart-related conditions.

"We've built a deep expertise in applying AI to understand the complexities and meaning of immense amounts of data, such as genomics and health records,” John Kelly SVP at IBM Watson Health, said in a statement. “Our latest collaboration will combine these capabilities with clinical insights, and refine how technology can provide explainable and valuable insights to clinicians as they study and treat serious conditions such as cardiovascular disease.”

Tel Aviv, Israel-based diagnostic company MaxQ AI announced last week that its ongoing collaboration with Intel has substantially increased the performance of its Accipio intracranial hemorrhage and stroke detection platform.

Many of the company’s neural network-based vision algorithms “are written using the Intel Distribution of OpenVINO Toolkit and optimized for Intel Processors, which accelerates the computational flow of the MaxQ Platform and enables clinicians to prioritize critical patients,” according to MaxQ AI COO and cofounder Robert Mehler. Doing so has yielded a more than 300 percent acceleration of computational flow, without any impact on hemorrhage detection accuracy.

CarePredict has signed on with Grand Retirement Communities to provide its remote monitoring and behavioral analytics platform to the Arkansas-based senior living community.

"We are thrilled to begin this partnership with Grand Retirement,” CarePredict CEO and founder Satish Movva said in a statement. "Apart from providing health and wellness insights on the residents, our solution also provides productivity insights and empowers the Grand Retirement staff to visualize the level of care their residents require and meaningfully prioritize workflow. Thereby, ensuring quality and timely care for the residents at Grand Retirement.”

Not-for-profit health system Sutter Health is tapping Ada Health, an AI-based personalized care technology vendor, to offer personalized, on-demand health guidance to help patients make informed decisions about their care. As part of the collaboration, Ada’s AI-powered symptom assessment and care navigation platform will be integrated into Sutter Health’s website and My Health Online patient portal, giving more than 3 million current Sutter patients, as well as new website visitors, a personalized care experience.

“Sutter Health is constantly seeking creative and effective ways to meet patients where they are for their care needs throughout our integrated network of care, and this is one of many new innovations to improve the patient experience,” Dr. Albert Chan, who leads Sutter Health’s digital patient experience team, said in a statement. “Ada Health’s platform takes care of the symptom intake tasks, which allows clinicians to devote more time to patient care, and also empowers our patients to better manage their own healthcare.”

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