Well, it wasn't quite the rain-soaked, networking-filled week I've grown accustomed to preparing for every January when trekking out to the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference. But I will say I'm pretty grateful to come out of this week without a ruined pair of shoes and without the classic post-JPM cold.
Thanks to all who shared their plans for this week. I got the sense that everyone seemed to be having a slowed-down week with some meetings, but more to come spread out over the next few weeks. FierceBiotech's Amirah Al Idrus has a good recap of how executives navigated the virtual event.
I have to say, reminding myself of when I went out to JPMorgan in 2016 when the Zika virus was spreading makes me a little grateful for the quieter conference week as attention stays on the pandemic.
One facet that's made the rollout slower: a high number of workers at senior living facilities have turned down the shots. Shelby Livingston spoke to one company that's now requiring its workers to get the vaccine.
While Andrew and Allison were tuning into pharma and biotech presentations, Shelby was tuned into what the health plans, health systems, and pharmacies had to say.
During Walgreens' presentation, the retail pharmacy shared that it's got a 200-person in-house startup that's working on improving healthcare. The details were slim for now, but Shelby pulled together what you need to know here.
It was interesting to hear about coming off the heels of news Blake Dodge and Áine Cain broke earlier in the week about Walmart.
They found that Walmart's building a new venture through its incubation arm Store No. 8 focused on using data to help shoppers make healthier choices.
The start of a new year is a good time to take stock of where the digital health industry stands. From just-budding startups to newly minted unicorns to publicly traded players, it's seeming like 2021 will be a critical year for the sector as the pandemic (hopefully) starts to ebb.
Startups, billionaire investor Vinod Khosla said at a Startup Health chat on Tuesday, should be wary of working with entrenched players. While talking about the work that BioNTech did with Pfizer to speed up the development and distribution of COVID-19 vaccines, Khosla said that "collaboration is generally BS-with some exceptions."
Also on the bigger end of digital health, Hugh Langley and Blake rounded up all the departures from Alphabet's life sciences arm Verily in the last year.
Their final tally: 20 top execs and managers left in the past year, including its head of people operations who's set to depart in January. Read the full list here.
I'll leave you with the billion-dollar+ healthcare startups we're keeping our eye on in 2021. It's an ever-changing list we'll be sure to update as companies make their public debuts and others reach the "unicorn" threshold.
Hope you all have a great weekend! I'll be back on Tuesday with more healthcare news ahead of inauguration day. Thoughts, questions, tips to tell me about in the meantime? You can find me at lramsey@businessinsider.com, and you can reach the entire healthcare team at healthcare@businessinsider.com.
