US health insurance giant Anthem Inc. is cooperating with K Health, a company founded by Israelis Allon Bloch (CEO), Israel Roth, and Ran Shaul. The app developed by K Health allows users to receive a medical opinion instead of going to their family doctor or a hospital emergency room. Anthem will install the app into its operations, and also add another level to its services. For example, a doctor can be consulted for payment after a medical opinion is obtained. K Health will receive a share of the revenue. At the same time, Anthem will gradually invest tens of millions of dollars in K Health.
Before Anthem's investment, K Health raised $40 million from leading investors, such as Mangrove Capital Partners, one of the first investors in Skype and Wix; Primary Venture Partners; Comcast Ventures; and 14W. The company has 100 employees in development and product, 75 of whom are in Israel. Bloch, K-Health's CEO, was CEO of Wix in its first years and later of MySupermarket, and also founded US company Vroom, which developed an application for buying and selling used cars. He was also previously an investor in Jerusalem Venture Partners. He now manages K-Health from New York.
K Health, founded three years ago, developed technology based on artificial intelligence for generating as accurate a medical opinion as possible. The company cooperates with Maccabi Health Services, which provided K Health with access to a large 20-year anonymous database of medical files, laboratory results, etc. K Health will now gain access to millions more users via Anthem. Insurance companies in the US do not provide medical services the way that Maccabi Health Services or Clalit Health Services do.
"We took this database of Maccabi, and using mathematical tools, we generated statistical insight. What does a doctor's note say? 'A 40 year-old man, headache in the morning, has or doesn't have anxiety, whether he has migraines, blood sample results, drugs, etc.' There is very rich information, and by analyzing these data, we managed to develop an application that conducts an intelligent conversation with the users, as of now on family medical matters or cases reaching the hospital emergency room," Bloch says, adding that the application can reduce the cost of a doctor by 90%, and that a more sophisticated and quicker conversation can be conducted by telephone, and the information reaches the doctor in a more orderly and comfortable way.
According to Bloch, K Health will receive revenue from the services provided by Anthem, but the company's business model is not final. "Even before this, our goal is to change the industry, which is based on outmoded protocols. We have built a dynamic system that we want to use in order to create a more up-to-date medical protocol. We're in the very early stages of realizing the business potential, but if we give people very reliable information about the state of their health, there will be a lot of business opportunities," he declares.
Published by Globes, Israel business news - en.globes.co.il - on July 23, 2019
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