8 Drivers of Digital Health: Macro Trends and Investment Strategy Implications (LionBird)

Summary

• LionBird sees 2020 as an unprecedented inflection point in digital health and lays out eight drivers that will define the coming decade.p.2
• The eight drivers include the modernization of healthcare finance, end-to-end population health automation, and diagnostics moving into the community and home.p.3
• There were 250,000 deaths attributable to preventable failures of patient safety in 2016.p.7
• Manual EHR entry takes up to 40% of the average clinician's time.p.6
• Platforms must be secure enough to deliver $3T in healthcare services.p.14
• LionBird is a venture capital firm investing in pre-scale digital health companies, founded in 2012, with more than 30 founding teams backed and over $100 million in AUM.p.15

Key insights

1. Activity-Based Costing breaks down expenses minute-by-minute for every provider involved in a course of treatment.p.4
2. LionBird looks for companies that bring fintech technologies and analytics into the provider, payer and patient realms.p.5
3. The pandemic has linked public health and population health, which were previously siloed.p.5
4. The next wave of safety innovation will bridge the digital and physical worlds using IoT, automation, AI and augmented reality.p.7
5. Telehealth will unbundle specialty care, with behavioral health standing out as a huge growth area.p.10
6. Basic diagnostic tests will be the first moved to physician-assisted home testing.p.11
7. The 2019 expansion of medicare reimbursement for telehealth visits paves the way for reimbursement of home testing devices.p.11
8. New privacy, security and compliance technologies will be needed to preserve patient and provider trust.p.13