Leading an organization like Health2047 is never boring. In executing our mission to radically transform healthcare for the modern age, we engage in continual collaboration with the American Medical Association, healthcare and technology communities, and a broad host of innovators and entrepreneurs working on new approaches to chronic disease prevention, data utilization, productivity enhancement, and value creation. 

Founded and headquartered in Silicon Valley, we’re no strangers to working in an atmosphere of disruption — regardless of whether it stems from emergent business models, technological and scientific breakthroughs, societal shifts, or even a pandemic. Immersed in it all, we strive daily to nurture powerful ideas into functioning ventures that solve real healthcare problems and demonstrate real potential for positive impact.

Essentially, we are always stirring many promising pots. So it is that several long-simmering plans might serendipitously come to fruition all at once, as was the case in Q1 this year with Health2047 spinouts Phenomix Sciences, Emergence Healthcare Group, and SiteBridge Research.

• Delivering Better Diagnostics for Chronic Disease 

March 22 marked the debut of Phenomix Sciences, the first company in our spring spinout trifecta. Phenomix supplies new weaponry in the battle to curb chronic disease through an innovative obesity diagnostic. Approximately 42% of adults in the United States are now affected by obesity, which contributes to a growing chronic disease burden that dominates annual U.S. healthcare spending, strains the system, and decreases quality of life. 

Existing therapies have proven ineffective for roughly 70% of obesity patients, so physician scientists Andres Acosta and Michael Camilleri focused research on finding a way to improve those odds. Their efforts resulted in Phenomix Sciences. The company’s AI-derived MyPhenome test analyzes blood for genomics, metabolomics, and hormone levels to identify four specific obesity phenotypes, which gives doctors the ability to prescribe more effective individualized anti-obesity therapies. Phenomix just signed an exclusive technology licensing agreement for the test with Mayo Clinic.

Recent clinical trials have shown that obesity therapies guided by phenotype are twice as likely to succeed as non-phenotype-guided approaches. According to Phenomix CEO Mark Bagnall (former Executive in Residence at Health2047), “We expect our MyPhenome test to fundamentally change the way obesity is both understood and treated.”

• Empowering Independent Physician Practices

Hot on the heels of Phenomix, we introduced our second 2021 spinout on April 12: Emergence Healthcare Group. Emergence was formed to address significant deterrents to — and the shrinking footprint of — independent physician practices. Once the standard professional goal for most American doctors, these days less than half of all physicians in the U.S. are choosing private practice.

That shift is largely fed by frustration. Best expressed in MedCity News last fall by Daphne Li, Health2047 Managing Director of Business Acceleration, and Michael Tutty, Group Vice President of Professional Satisfaction and Practice Sustainability at the American Medical Association (AMA): “Independent physician practices play a critical role in the fabric of our health system…But modern private practice faces increasing economic challenges often driven by non-medical issues such as increasing administrative burdens; large fixed overhead for staff, equipment, and space; and the lack of time or resources to develop expertise in evolving technology, regulation, and payment/reimbursement models.”

Emergence aims to remove those challenges. Jae Chun, founder and CEO, believes that “it’s critical that independent practices are able to benefit from new solutions to improve both practice profitability and professional satisfaction.” The company provides a turnkey solution for physicians to launch new and/or manage existing independent practices by supplying complete day-to-day practice management, EHR, billing and collections, marketing, and customer service. Emergence covers everything from securing and maintaining clinic space to hiring, training, and managing non-clinical staff. The model also supplies a lever for individual practices to benefit from the same economies of scale currently enjoyed by large healthcare systems.

For doctors, Emergence essentially enables autonomy by removing administration from the equation so that owning an independent practice no longer means having to run one. 

• Democratizing Clinical Trials

We completed our spinout hat trick on April 21 with SiteBridge Research, a startup designed to radically expand and enhance the clinical trial ecosystem by fostering greater inclusion — for both physicians and patients.  

Most clinical trials today are conducted in just a handful of academic healthcare systems, creating a choke point that radically limits research participation in the U.S. to just 3% of physicians and patients (with minority and other underrepresented patient populations taking part in clinical studies at rates less than half of their representation in the broader population). Meanwhile, more geographically diverse community physician practices serving more demographically diverse patient pools generally lack the underlying support systems, training, and resources required to function as clinical trial sites. 

SiteBridge is leveraging its Trial-In-A-Box platform to remediate this imbalance, creating a clinical trial network of independent physician practices and enabling research to extend to the point-of-care across the nation with clinical research training, resources, and support spanning initiation and trial site start-up all the way through study delivery and close out. For physicians and patients, this means new opportunities and options for innovative care. For pharmaceutical companies and medical therapy developers, this means improved study design and access to more targeted data to optimize treatments across a broader, more inclusive patient population.

SiteBridge was founded by Manesh R. Patel, chief of the division of Cardiology and division of Clinical Pharmacology at Duke University School of Medicine. The CEO is pharmaceutical veteran Chris Komelasky, and representing Health2047 on the SiteBridge board is managing director Neile Grayson. 

Our Expanding Portfolio 

These three new ventures join our existing stable of bold spinouts: real-time data access innovation in Medcurio, tech-enabled managed care for chronically underserved populations in Zing Health, scalable and sustainable chronic disease prevention in First Mile Care, and secure sharing of trusted health data in Akiri. 

But we will not rest on our laurels. Together with the AMA, Health2047 remains committed to driving healthcare modernization. We continue fostering powerful ideas and stirring our many promising pots — and we anticipate sharing more news about ingenious solutions and exciting spinouts in the months ahead.

— Lawrence Cohen is CEO at Health2047.