Amwell is acquiring two digital health startups for a combined $320 million as the publicly traded telehealth company looks to expand its platform offerings beyond the Covid-fueled virtual care boom. The two companies—SilverCloud Health and Conversa Health—are part of Amwell’s strategy to work with patients along their entire care journey and not just limit the relationship to one-off virtual visits. “The magic is what happens when you bring them all together, when you use technologies to surround the patients in their reality on a regular basis,” says Roy Schoenberg, who serves as co-CEO of the Boston, Massachusetts-based company alongside his brother Ido. The way to achieve this “omnipresence,” he says, is to use automation to move beyond the usual supply and demand constraints in healthcare.
While Amwell offers telehealth visits with therapists and psychiatrists, there is a shortage of clinicians in the United States and patients are left on their own to manage their care outside weekly visits. Boston-based SilverCloud is a behavioral health platform that works to solve this problem by offering programs to help users address issues like anxiety and depression through cognitive behavioral therapy-based exercises. The idea is to increase engagement while lowering costs and the platform is used by more than 300 organizations, including Kaiser-Permanente, Optum and Providence Health. “To solve the problem of being next to patients on a regular basis, we have to bring in automated companionship,” says Schoenberg. One of the other benefits for Amwell is SilverCloud’s international footprint. It has headquarters in London and Dublin and is used by the national health systems in the U.K. and Ireland.
Portland, Oregon-based Conversa Health operates a patient engagement tool for health systems, which ingests clinical data about patients and generates conversations in between visits. For example, it offers automated and personalized digital check-ins with patients, such as asking how they feel and asking if they’re taking their medications. The company offers a host of tools, including digital triage, as well as Covid-19 screening.