What happens when patients declined to share data

When researcher Alex Rosenblat was pregnant, she systematically declined to share her medical data with third parties on each consent form she received at her doctors’ office. But following media reports questioning data mining company Phreesia’s privacy practices, she emailed to confirm that it did not have consent to use her data. What she encountered was Kafka-esque and troubling: Instead of confirming she had never consented, it said it would delete her authorization — which she says she never gave — and later claimed it had no record of the authorization because it had been deleted. Read more on how even declining to share your data might not be enough to stop companies from harvesting it. 

Startups

MedArrive’s latest $8 million round

Home health-focused company MedArrive — led by former Uber and Lyft exec Dan Trigub — banked an $8 million funding round led by Cobalt Ventures, a subsidiary of Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Kansas City. The round brings its total funding to $40.5 million. 

Since raising a $25 million series A in 2021, funding has become much harder to come by, Trigub told STAT. Some investors aren’t sold on the idea that serving Medicaid populations make good business; the ones that are must understand that the financial timelines are different compared to businesses serving commercially insured patients. 

Working with low-income populations requires a lot of careful logistics which can certainly be challenging to scale, but Trigub said he’s confident that MedArrive’s approach — offering its provider and payer customers access to white labeled tech that can dispatch a team of skilled paramedics, EMTs and community health workers into patient’s homes — can seriously cut medical costs. By going into patients’ homes, the staff can also assess social as well as medical needs. 

“There’s companies out there where you download an app, push a button and you have someone to come into your home and help you with a UTI and you never see that person again. That’s not going to work with this population,” he said.

5 startups tackling healthcare’s workforce crisis

Hospitals and nursing homes are desperate for nurses and doctors — and staffing startups including Nomad Health and IntelyCare aim to cash in, my colleague Ambar Castillo writes. They represent a range of models, from using machine learning to help employers whip up more competitive offers to selling an app letting nurses search for per diem shifts. Grapefruit Health takes another unusual approach: Tapping students with some clinical experience to do tasks like patient outreach, delivering negative test results, and helping people use their patient portals. 

“All of these tasks today that health systems need to do and want to do, but can’t, because there aren’t people to do it, or they don’t have the dollars, or they don’t even have the HR teams to onboard a hundred students —we really take care of all of that,” Grapefruit founder and CEO Eric Alvarez told Ambar. Read more here.