TBD Health Raises $4.4M Seed Round to Expand its Hybrid Sexual Healthcare Offerings Nationally

TBD Health Raises $4.4M Seed Round to Expand its Hybrid Sexual Healthcare Offerings Nationally

As Reproductive Rights are Defunded and Debated Nationally, TBD Health Aims to Democratize Access to Inclusive Sexual Care
TBD Health, a sexual healthcare provider revolutionizing the medical landscape through unparalleled digital and in-person clinical care, today announced a $4.4 million seed round led by Tusk Venture Partners, with participation from Springdale Ventures, Human Ventures, Expansion VC, Starbloom Capital, Hyphen Capital, and The Community Fund along with several strategic angels. With this new financing, TBD Health is expanding to all 50 states, democratizing access to its sexual healthcare offerings, consisting of at-home STD testing and emergency contraception available via telehealth or in-person in its Las…

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Ensuring digital health solutions help, not harm

Ensuring digital health solutions help, not harm

A healthcare risk prediction algorithm used on more than 200 million people across the country was found to demonstrate racial bias.One-third of the top 100 hospitals in the U.S. were found to be using a tracking tool called Meta Pixel to collect and send patients’ personal health information to Facebook without their consent.
Pulse oximeters – digital products that use infrared light beams to measure the amount of oxygen in the blood – have transformed the way we care for people with conditions from heart failure to COVID, but are inaccurate for people with dark skin.
How do these egregious practices pass through…

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Elation Health Buys Medical Billing Company to Create All-in-One Tech Platform for Primary Care Providers

Elation Health Buys Medical Billing Company to Create All-in-One Tech Platform for Primary Care Providers

Elation Health — a San Francisco-based company that sells its electronic health record (EHR) and other technology solutions to primary care providers — on Thursday announced its  acquisition of medical billing firm Lightning MD.
The deal will help Elation become an all-in-one technology platform for primary care offices, CEO Kyna Fong said in a recent interview. Fong founded Elation with her brother in 2010. The siblings grew up in Canada, where their father was a primary care physician — and a passionate one. He was so passionate that he ended up moving his family to the U.S. because he couldn’t “practice the…

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How to Leverage Diagnostic Development to Guard Against RSV, Flu and Covid-19 [Sponsored]

How to Leverage Diagnostic Development to Guard Against RSV, Flu and Covid-19 [Sponsored]

For the first two years of the Covid-19 pandemic, healthcare professionals focused on understanding the Covid-19 virus, how best to guard against it, and developing tests to detect it. They also tracked, aggregated, and analyzed health data to assess and monitor the public health threat on a regional, state and country-wide level. In the longer term, vaccine development and distribution were used to slow the spread to avoid a collapse of the health system and to reduce the potency of the virus for the majority of people.
More recently, attention has shifted to the long perceived threat of viruses coming together with…

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Blood Biotech Grifols Cuts Deep in the U.S. to Find €400M in Savings

Blood Biotech Grifols Cuts Deep in the U.S. to Find €400M in Savings

Grifols, a company that turns blood plasma into therapies for immunological disorders and other conditions, is laying off about 2,000 U.S. workers as part of a corporate restructuring projected to yield up to €400 million in annual cost savings, the biotech announced Wednesday.
The layoffs represent about 8% of the Barcelona-based company’s global workforce, but they will happen mainly in its U.S. plasma operations. That’s notable because as a company that relies on plasma, the U.S. is vital to its business. The starting point for Grifols’s therapies is blood plasma. Key to its drug-making process is fractionation, in which the protein components…

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The Path Forward for Healthcare’s People Matching Problem

The Path Forward for Healthcare’s People Matching Problem

The following is a guest article by Rachel Podczervinski MS, RHIA, Vice President of Professional Services at Harris Data Integrity Solutions.
Efforts to identify the right path forward for healthcare’s patient matching problem are gaining a foothold as stakeholders from across the spectrum come together to remove obstacles and implement effective solutions. Most notably, in 2022, efforts by industry organizations like Patient ID Now led to the temporary removal of Section 510 from the U.S. House and Senate Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies (Labor-HHS) appropriations bills. While it was ultimately reinserted in the final version, its initial removal…

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HHS Aims To Reduce Prescription Drug Costs Through 3 New Models

HHS Aims To Reduce Prescription Drug Costs Through 3 New Models

The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services (HHS) unveiled three new models Tuesday that will be tested by the CMS Innovation Center and aim to lower prescription drug costs. The models include access to $2 generic drugs.
The news is in response to President Joe Biden’s executive order issued in October, which directed HHS to find ways to lower prescription drug costs and improve access to drug therapies for those enrolled in Medicare and Medicaid health plans. The models are meant to build on the Inflation Reduction Act of 2022, which includes allowing Medicare to negotiate lower prescription drug prices for…

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Heartpoint Global Hopes To Disrupt Congenital Pulmonary Hypertension Treatment With Minimally Invasive Device

Heartpoint Global Hopes To Disrupt Congenital Pulmonary Hypertension Treatment With Minimally Invasive Device

To correct high blood pressure of the pulmonary artery, which can arise from congenital defects of the heart, an artificial heart ucan cost upwards of $190,000. Heart disease accounted for about one in five deaths in 2020 in theUnited States.
Even minimally invasive pulmonary artery banding — a surgical technique that has been in use since Harry Truman was president — requires access to the chest cavity. A new treatment under development by HeartPoint Global seeks to provide a minimally invasive alternative to current treatments for pulmonary arterial hypertension associated with Congenital Heart Disease.A device delivered through the leg would cost only…

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