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New Signify Bidding War Details
A Filing with the SEC on SVCThe proposed $8 billion acquisition of Signify Health gives us a bit more insight into the bidding war that unfolded over the summer – and how CVS ended up paying far more than it was worth. he originally proposed. What we know so far from the reports: UnitedHealth Group, Amazonand Health Care Option all made offers on the company. According to the filing, there were a total of five parties involved in the final process. After receiving an unsolicited offer of $20 per share in June, Signify reached out to 15 parties to see if they might be interested.
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When all the offers were collected a month later, CVS came out with the best offer of $24 per share. But CVS ended up paying more than $30 per share — an outrageously higher price considering that at the start of the process in June, Signify shares were selling for $12.
Why? The University of Michigan‘s Erik Gordon explained to my colleague Katie that one possibility is that leaks, gossip and hype seem to drive up transaction prices: “If you look at an acquisition, what you see is that there’s this kind of inexplicable price increase before the acquisition is announced.(Thanks also to Katie, who followed this story, to plod through SEC documents!)
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Why the UHG-Change deal got the green light
A newly unsealed opinion sheds light on why federal judge shot dead the justice departmentthe effort to block UnitedHealth Groupthe acquisition of the technology company Changing healthcare. The government had argued that the deal would threaten competition and that UHG could abuse the new wealth of health insurance claims data by sharing it with its health insurance arm, UnitedHealthcare. But while Judge Carl Nichols agreed the acquisition would give UHG and Change control of more than 90% of the market for some type of claims handling, he was happy with UHG’s plans to divest the Change unit. who handles these complaints. Nichols also dismissed the government’s argument that the union would make other insurers less likely to innovate, noting that it provided “no real-world evidence”.
How has out-of-state telehealth been used?
For a really good idea of how patients have availed themselves of the relaxed licensure rules that allow doctors to practice out of state during the pandemic, watch Washington, D.C. January to June 2021 , 38% of resident telehealth visits were from out-of-state physicians, and more than 90% of those were to clinicians in nearby Maryland or Virginia, new research shows published in the JAMA Health Forum looking at out-of-state usage nationwide.
The results highlight what the co-author and Harvard Professor Ateev Mehrotra calls the “bread and butter” nature of use. “We all recognize that people will use it for rarer conditions, but we point out that for people who live in DC or near a state line, it’s fairly common to have a primary care physician in out of your state,” he wrote to me. About two-thirds of out-of-state visits were preceded by an in-person visit to the same physician. In the absence of national licensing reform, the authors suggest that regional pacts could be helpful. Important caveat: The analysis of health insurance claims may not be representative of, for example, a younger, commercially insured population.
Using Fitbits to explore the connection between exercise and cognition
If you tell a doctor you’re anxious, they’ll probably recommend that you exercise, but researchers in Jeremy Manning’s lab at Dartmouth are looking for a little more rigor behind these recommendations.
First, Manning and his colleagues found a clever and inexpensive way to explore the links between exercise and memory: Use Amazonthe collaborative work platform of Mechanical Turkishthe researchers recruited Fitbit users wishing to submit their anonymized data and perform a battery of memory tests. Researchers have found links between low-intensity activity and episodic, or autobiographical, memory and high-intensity activity and spatial memory, or how well you remember where you left your car keys. Manning warns that these associations must now be studied to establish correlations.
One day, Manning suggests, you might be prescribed a series of exercises that target specific brain changes. “If you’re training for a marathon, there’s a particular workout schedule you might want to follow,” he told me. “And we think there might be a similar timeline that we might suggest for brain health, whether it’s cognitive or mental health.”
Industry news
- Well funded startup Lyra Health announcement an expansion of adolescent mental health, highlighting the continued demand for mental health services even in the face of a faltering economy.
- Rockley Photonics announced that it has developed a new, smaller version of its laser technology that it claims enables wearable devices to measure blood pressure, core body temperature, blood sugar and other metrics. The company has attracted a lot of attention for its agreements with Apple and Medtronic, although you can’t currently purchase any device using its current-generation technology. The new laser chip is expected to be available in 2024, and CEO Andrew Rickman told me it could enable vital signs tracking in glasses, headphones, and clothing.
- Carbon Health announced an agreement to provide virtual primary care to eligible people Massachusetts Blue Cross Blue Shield members.
- Health Data Company nference launches its nSights clinical data analytics platform, which, according to the press release, will enable “biopharmaceutical, medical device and diagnostics partners and customers to gain exclusive access to interact directly with the entire Mayo Clinic health data repository that nference has curated and anonymized.
- SyncThinka company we last heard about in our investigation into the Breakthrough Devices programrenamed NeuroSync. The company has FDA clearances for technology that analyzes eye movements for signs of brain damage such as concussions. Among other new efforts, he is working on a “biomarker identification platform” for attention deficit hyperactivity disorder.
What we read
- Next employers health care crisis, Axios
- Publicly insured and uninsured patients are more likely than other patients to be treated unfairly in health facilities due to their type of coverage, Robert Wood Johnson Foundation
- In a first, a health panel calls for systematic screening for anxiety in adults, Washington Post
- Meta is quietly reducing staff in an effort to cut costs, the wall street journal
- Addressing the “elephant in the room” of AI clinical decision support through organization-level regulation, Digital Health PLOS
