Morning Briefing
Summaries of health policy coverage from major news organizations
Start-Up Collective Health Tackles Notoriously Complicated Health Insurance Sector
While many start-ups have sought to make their name in the health care industry, fewer are taking on the knotty health insurance information services sector. Collective Health, which provides tools to help companies with their employer-provided insurance, said on Tuesday that it had raised $81 million in a new round of financing. The round was led by Google Ventures, a new investor, and existing backers New Enterprise Associates, Founders Fund, Maverick Capital, Redpoint Ventures and RRE Ventures. de la Merced, 10/20)
Gritstone Oncology Inc., the latest company in Cambridge鈥檚 booming life sciences hub to focus on developing personalized treatments for cancer, has received $102 million in funding. The company, which is headquartered in San Francisco but does bioinformatics and gene-sequencing work in Cambridge, said it would seek to discover and develop tumor-specific therapies, with an initial focus on lung cancer. It鈥檚 one of several companies to focus on 鈥減recision medicine,鈥 which could improve cancer treatment but is still in its early stages. (Newsham, 10/20)
David Vivero and his team at Amino, a San Francisco start-up, have been assembling for the last two years an unusual collection of health data for a consumer service. The online service, which was introduced on Tuesday, is built on a database that includes nearly every practicing doctor in America and the treatment of more than 188 million people. (Lohr, 10/20)
In marketplace news of possible mergers -
AmSurg Corp., a provider of outsourced physician services to hospitals and others, is seeking to combine with Team Health Holdings Inc. in an effort to gain scale amid a wave of consolidation in the health-care industry. Team Health rebuffed the offer in a statement Tuesday, pointing to insufficient value and the benefits tied to its planned deal to buy another outsourced-services provider, IPC Healthcare Inc., for about $1.4 billion. (Cimilluca, 10/20)
Connecticut Attorney General George Jepsen will no longer recuse himself from the review of a proposed $54 billion merger between Anthem and Cigna, his office disclosed on Tuesday. Throughout his tenure as attorney general, Jepsen has recused himself from all matters regarding Cigna because his wife, Diana Sousa, worked there. On June 23 he recused himself from matters regarding Anthem because of the merger talks between Anthem and Cigna. (Radelat, 10/20)
