TytoCare’s medical exam kit consists of a digital stethoscope, otoscope, tongue depressor and an infrared thermometer.
If you did a Google search of TytoCare and landed on the homepage of the Israeli smart medical device company, you would be forgiven for thinking that it is a direct-to-consumer play. After all, the homepage image highlights the message that anyone who wants the ability to have a thorough medical exam without having to go to their primary care clinic can simply buy the smart medical kit and connect virtually to a telemedicine provider.
But the consumer is not the main target market for the company that has been around since 2012 and with a fundraising total of more than $156 million, according to Crunchbase. In fact, business growth is largely coming from working with health systems, large self-insured employers and insurance companies. Earlier this month, TytoCare announced that MemorialCare, a nonprofit health system in Orange and Los Angeles Counties would be offering remote medical exams to patients during their virtual visits with a doctor powered by TytoCare’s devices. Through its partnership with Amwell, the medical devices company is integrating its systems and tools to make it easier for Amwell’s provider customers to examine patients virtually. Back in 2019, the company became integrated with Epic and available on the Epic Orchard app so that patients could launch TytoCare-powered telehealth visits from Epic’s MyChart app.
In other words, the virtual telemedicine interaction is being transformed: from a visit that merely collected patient-reported information that is anecdotal at best to one where patients would be able to use TytoCare’s smart devices that transmitted vital signs and other data to their doctors just a screen away.
“As health systems look to permanently incorporate and expand their telehealth options in the post-pandemic landscape, they’ve come to realize that audio/video-only telehealth isn’t enough to provide patients with the quality of care they demand,” said Dedi Gilad, CEO and co-founder of the company, in a news release announcing the partnership with MemorialCare. “TytoCare’s reimagining of triage and virtual primary care will allow patients to benefit from simple, efficient, and accurate exams from the comfort of home.”
It’s not just the pandemic crisis that TytoCare is addressing with it connected tools. In the other existential crisis being felt in the Russian war against Ukraine, TytoCare has also leveraged its connected devices and software platform to take care of people in the besieged nation. Through a partnership with UNICEF, TytoCare donated 50 telemedicine devices to 10 medical centers in eastern Ukraine. The goal is to make sure that children who need medical care during the Russian aggression can avoid having to travel far.
In a recent Zoom interview, a TytoCare executive described another effort underway to help Ukrainian refugees.
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.
“Sheba Medical Center out of Israel is partnering with TytoCare and they’re actually working directly within Moldova,” explained David Bardan, vice president and head of U.S. commercial in TytoCare. “As folks are coming across the border, they are working, at the virtual hospital there with Sheba to connect [refugees] to clinicians, physicians, wherever they may be in the hub and utilize our technology to more or less examine the patient more thoroughly to make an assessment of their physical state.” [Sheba is Israel’s largest hospital.]
Through TytoCare’s FDA-cleared handheld examination kit, users can perform comprehensive physical exams of the heart, skin, ears, throat, abdomen, and lungs as well as measure heart rate and body temperature.
These devices are not only important in monitoring chronic disease patients remotely, but are key to a fundamental reimagining of what virtual care and telemedicine means. TytoCare executives are working with health systems to find ways to clinically integrate telemedicine using connected devices with how the latter have historically delivered care. And that has meant an evolution for TytoCare’s business too.
“It’s allowing us to go beyond just urgent care,” Bardan said. “We have the examination capabilities … but the power of the product is really in the hands of the service providers that we work with because they’re capable of taking what has traditionally been a lot of check-the box type of telemedicine to new levels of thinking about how can telemedicine, how can telehealth, virtual care wrap around how care is delivered amongst these organizations, thinking about things beyond just urgent care, through to primary care, pediatric care, specialty care, pre-op, post-op management, hospital-at-home initiatives.”
That begs the question of what those examination capabilities are. If one were to order the TytoCare Medical Exam Kit right off of TytoCare’s website, you get:
- Base unit which is a modular device with a touchscreen that displays exam data and can be leveraged as a medical device
- A ring connector that transforms the base unit into a digital stethoscope to listen to heart, lung and gastrointestinal sounds
- Otoscope to look inside the ear
- Tongue depressor that allows a visual into a person’s throat
- Infrared thermometer
Bardan said that the above is contained in a standard kit, but depending on need of the customer — health system partner, payers or self-insured employer — other smart devices may be made available. These are a smart weight scale, a blood pressure monitor and a pulse oximeter.
Data points gathered through the devices can be fed directly into a health system’s electronic health record if required. Doctors can use TytoCare’s products in the clinic but patients may also use them at home to send the data to physicians who can review the data before a video visit with the patient to discuss results.
“So there’s a multitude of workflows that the product supports and the real unique nature about Tyto is that it is meant to be used by a non-clinically trained individual,” Bardan declared.
He said that the company has more than 200 customers in 26 countries, but declined to comment about revenue growth and profitability. Bardan would only say that the company has seen a 100% increase in revenue in 2021. That is not surprising: One of the byproducts of the pandemic has been greater reimbursement of remote monitoring, which has boosted telehealth adoption as well, thereby benefiting companies like TytoCare.
Competitors, too, likely benefited from the pandemic’s effect in boosting telemedicine. But Bardan initially declined to identify any by name saying that he doesn’t recognize any company as a direct competitor especially from the perspective of what TytoCare can do in the home. When pressed about companies that have developed smart medical devices and whether they could be considered a competitor, Bardan responded like this:
“I mean, again, it depends. I think if, for example, you’re working across a cardiology use case, then if all [you] needed was a stethoscope, then you would probably consider the Eko stethoscope to be a great digital stethoscope, maybe the Littman stethoscope and digital solution they have,” Bardin conceded before continuing on. “But where the line gets drawn is dependent on how it looks to be utilized — if it’s meant more so to be utilized in the home, that’s really where Tyto differentiates and shines is. We still have kind of the only offering really around bringing, um, that type of unique tool set into the home with the navigation and software functionality wrapped into it.”
And now into a war as well.
