It looks like CB Insights has aligned its digital health investment thinking closer to the likes of Health 2.0, Mercom Capital and Rock Health with its latest report. Its digital health stats for Q4 added up for the full year 2015 reveal $4.6 billion in 456 digital health deals. It is part of a larger look at technology investments in 2015.
A report by Health 2.0 showed that digital health investment climbed to $4.8 billion last year, compared with $4.6 billion in 2014.
Matt Holt of Health 2.0 has maintained that CB Insights had underestimated the size of digital health dealflow.
For its part, Holt said Health 2.0 has tweaked its methodology for counting these deals since it initially worked with the Office of the National Coordinator to produce these reports in 2011. The effect of those changes has been to make the different categories more distinctive rather than overlapping and has reduced the number of deals by about 10 percent
CB Insights’ Anand Sanwal didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Mercom Capital’s reckoning of the year’s digital health deals added up to $4.6 billion as well, spread across 574 deals. In an emailed statement about its methodology, spokesman Sean Harris said:
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.
We cover VC funding activity globally; most of the other firms cover the US only. We cover deals of all sizes; some only cover deals above $2 million. We cover debt and IPO transactions separately while some firms are lumping it with VC funding. Our report does not include bioinformatics/genetics deals, Benefits/Insurance brokers or drug delivery companies while most others do. Our report also covers Health IT service providers which some don’t.
I’ve also included similar charts from Rock Health and StartUp Health as a comparison, although the ones I have below reflect a broader view over several years.
Rock Health
StartUp Health is a bit of an outlier in that its estimate for investment is about $1 billion more than the other groups mentioned here. It has said that it counts all publicly disclosed deals across digital health.
Photo: Free Digital Photos
