Venture funding for analytics, telemedicine, clinical surveillance heating up
A recent spate of substantial venture investments are indicative of where the health industry is headed in 2017 and the years ahead, suggesting a burgeoning trend toward smarter data for clinical quality and value-based agility enabled by virtual care.
This past week, on Jan. 5, Arcadia Healthcare Solutions gained $30 million in new capital from investors including the Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, GE Ventures and others. The cash infusion will help the data aggregation and analytics company innovate in its offerings for 60 or so customers: primarily ambulatory sites pursuing value-based care arrangements with affiliated health plans, IDNs, ACOs and more.
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The money will help Arcadia continue to build on its acquisitions of Concordant and Sage Technologies (2011 and 2015, respectively), expanding its analytics platform to help broaden population health management initiatives nationwide.
"Arcadia’s deep expertise in transforming isolated data into critical insights that enable providers to close gaps in care and enable better outcomes is central to our investment hypothesis around population health," Joel Krikston, managing director at Merck GHI.
On Jan. 9, telemedicine company SnapMD closed Series A extension for $3.25 million, bringing the total funding it's raised so far to $9.15 million. Officials say they'll put the money to work developing its Virtual Care Management platform and expand efforts to build revenue through channel partnerships with companies such as athenahealth and Konica Minolta.
The same day, PeraHealth, which develops predictive clinical surveillance technology, announced it had secured $14 million the equity firm Mainsail Partners, which will be put to work building out it clinical tools, help spur efforts toward further adoption and enable ongoing R&D.
At use in more than 80 hospitals such as Yale New Haven Health System and Houston Methodist, PeraHealth's technology integrates with EHRs to help optimize bed assignment prioritize nursing assignment, improve clinical documentation accuracy, inform discharge plans and more. Its proprietary Rothman Index is patient acuity model and scoring system that can help manage illnesses such as sepsis by helping clinicians spot patients most in need of earlier intervention.
"We're very impressed with PeraHealth's products," said Michael Anderson, a partner at Mainsail Partners. "Customers have demonstrated meaningful clinical improvements, like reductions in mortality rates, by using PeraHealth. Also impressive is the ease by which customers integrate the product into their daily routine and electronic medical record software."
Twitter: @MikeMiliardHITN
Email the writer: mike.miliard@himssmedia.com
