Given Google Ventures’ profile in healthcare investment, the companies it chooses to back make folks sit up and take notice. In a rare talk, Google Ventures General Partner Dr. Krishna Yeshwant shared some of the things that inform its investment choices and others what constrain them. MobiHealthNews highlighted the talk at the Hx Refactored conference in Boston this week.
Predictive analytics, clinical decision support, telemedicine, diagnostic tools and autism spectrum disorder have been areas of interest for the corporate VC.
But one particular challenge has been deciding which startups best to help people with the socio-economic challenges most people lack. MobiHealthNews noted that Yeshwant split up patient populations by the complexity of their medical condition and socio-economic challenges.
“At one corner you have low social, low medical complexity, and that’s basically like everybody I work with at Google: the Googler population,” he said. “They have a good job. They have insurance. They are usually not alcoholic. At the other end of the spectrum, the high social, high medical complexity patient population is largely beset by any number of social issues: homeless, oftentimes severe psychiatric illness, enough so that they’ve alienated most family members. They don’t have a lot of social support around them. Combined with profound medical co-morbidity, because if you can’t figure out how to transfer yourself to the hospital, you miss most of your appointments, all of these things get worse”
He also raised a point about the disconnect between what product developers perceive as the needs of patients with complex needs without factoring in things like limited access to resources, like a smartphone.
“Once a week, twice a week, an engineer from Google shows up in my office saying they want to do something in healthcare…They have read articles, they get that, ‘Look there’s 20 percent of the patient population that’s 80 percent of our costs — what do we do for that group?’. That 20 percent of people. They are not the same person as you. They are different. You’re not going to come up with an app that fixes their diabetes. I would love nothing more than for that to not be the case. They just don’t have a phone — that’s the only place in my life where I see people who have flip phones or no phones.”
Despite the fact that 65 percent of people now own smartphones — nearly double 2011’s numbers, according to a Pew report — it will take before that trickles down the most vulnerable patient populations. Yeshwant said that for now, provider groups like One Medical, which are testing out specialized care on the high-end of the market, are a good investment because he thinks it’s easier to test these services with more high-tech patients first, MobiHealthNews reported.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Yeshwant also called attention to the next president election as a significant investment risk deterring it from making investments in aspects of health IT that could undergo changes depending on which party takes office after Obama’s term ends.
“If we have a president who is elected on the mandate of repealing or dismantling Obamacare and really feels like that’s their job, is that really impossible for them to do? It doesn’t seem to be at that stage. I would like us to be at that stage. As an investor, that’s the thesis that I’m investing heavily along. At the same time I’m putting large dollars into ones where I feel like there’s a story for them today but they are dramatically benefited as we shift into this new world… I personally don’t want to expose Google Ventures to that sort of risk just yet.”
