|06.18.20| UK backtracks on Apple-Google contact tracing tech; Unite Use acquires predictive SDOH analytics firm

Community care service-coordination platform Unite Us announced this week that it has acquired Staple Health, a social determinants of health analytics company. The terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Founded in 2017, Staple Health's specialty is predictive analytics regarding the role social factors can play in various health outcomes. Unite Us was interested in adding these strengths to its existing in-house analytics capabilities.

"Staple had the expertise we wanted and also aligned with our mission and vision to build healthier communities – we wanted both their technology, and extensive health analytics experience," Kelly Binder, chief of staff at Unite Us, said in a statement. "There was a natural, cultural fit with our team,"

Unite Us’ digital platform handles external referrals between community services and providers, but also tracks each patients’ outcomes and their journey through care. The company’s goal is to develop a unified support network able to address social determinants of health in ways that health systems or social service workers working alone could not.

WHAT'S THE IMPACT?

The combined efforts of these two companies stand to "enable payers and providers to not only identify both individualized risk and community needs, but also provide them with the immediate ability to address those needs through accountable networks of community partners" at a nationwide level, according to the announcement from Unite Us.

More tangibly, a representative for Unite Health noted that the acquisition provides the SDOH company with a new database of 270 million individuals, as well as new relationships with business partners Alliance and Aspenti Health.

"We've always offered data and insights to our partners, but now we can give them the ability to make more strategic, intentional decisions to help individuals and communities in the most impactful ways," Dan Brillman, Unite Us cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. "This was the next logical step as we build a national public health infrastructure that truly integrates health and social care."

THE LARGER TREND

COVID-19 has only served to amplify the strain on healthcare and community service providers, Unite Us cofounder and president Taylor Justice and Manik Bhat, CEO of fellow SDOH-management platform Healthify, said during a recent HIMSS20 digital session.

Both executives said that they expect the demand for the community services that their platforms facilitate to remain high for months or longer, but noted that innovative approaches to SDOH that extend beyond short-term fixes have become a new priority for policymakers and other stakeholders.

"City governments and state governments are looking for solutions, looking for answers, and, historically, their knee-jerk reaction during COVID-19 hasn't been human and social services," Justice said during the session. "But I think we've been pretty successful at having their ear, giving them a game plan of how we can implement our solutions, and that we've done this before. This isn't a brand-new concept that we're bringing to them and saying, 'Hey, we think we can execute.' We're saying, 'No, we know we can execute. Here are the KPIs. Here's when we are going live.'"

It’s been a rocky road for the UK’s contact-tracing app. The U.K. is now turning back to using Apple and Google’s tracing model, BBC first reported.

This news comes a little over a month after the U.K. announced its plans not to use Apple and Google’s much-anticipated contact-tracing tool, as originally planned, according to the BBC . At the time, the NHSX – which works on the UK’s digital health efforts – proposed a centralized system, rather than Apple and Google’s decentralized system for tracing.

Apple’s Simon Thompson will be taking the reins of the project in the U.K., according to the report.

Apple and Google’s tracing API, which first went live in late May, uses Bluetooth technology, and aims to help public health agencies deploy apps that tell individuals when they may have been exposed to COVID-19.

The companies stress that the tool does not collect location data and that individual users ultimately decide whether or not to report their positive COVID-19 diagnosis through the public health agency's app.

WHY IT MATTERS

While the number of coronavirus cases is still largely unknown, the World Health Organization is reporting over eight million cases to date, with over 440,000 deaths.

Governments and public health organizations have scrambled to stop the spread. Over the spring, contact-tracing apps have been pitched as a way to help alert individuals to if they have been exposed.

However, contact-tracing efforts have had somewhat of a mixed response, with privacy remaining at the heart of the debate.

“Contact tracing apps collect and combine two highly sensitive categories of information: location and health status,” Ryan Calo, a professor of law at the University of Washington, and Kinsa CEO Inder Singh, said during a US Senate committee hearing on big data and privacy protections. “It seems fair to wonder whether these apps, developed by small teams, will be able to keep such sensitive information private and secure. To the extent digital contact tracing – or any private, technology-driven response to the pandemic – involves the sharing of healthcare data with private parties, there is also the specter of inadequate transparency or consent.”

THE LARGER TREND

The U.K. is hardly the only government looking to contact apps to curb the spread of coronavirus. The Indian government has created its own tracing app, dubbed Aarogya Setu, and is requiring that employers make their staff download the app.

In the Asia Pacific region, Singapore launched one of the first Bluetooth-enabled apps, called TraceTogether , to help support and supplement current contact-tracing efforts in the nation-state in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19.

But it hasn’t been all smooth sailing. Norway's contact-tracing app, called the Smittestopp, was temporarily banned due to privacy concerns from the Norwegian Data Protection Authority. Back in May, an Amnesty International investigation found Qatar’s mandatory COVID-19 tracing app had a weakness in its configuration that could have left it open to cyberattacks.