The Madison company healthfinch’s effort to automate routine tasks for physicians and clinics is getting a boost with a $7.5 million fundraising round.
The round, led by Adams Street Partners, will help healthfinch develop a new platform that integrates its three apps, which already help more than 2,000 physicians across the country, said CEO Jonathan Baran.
“They’re overwhelmed with the amount of work that’s being placed on them. … We take that load off their plate,” he said.
That work includes prescription refills, which healthfinch makes easier by automating much of the manual labor on them and “teeing up” the refill requests for clinics’ approval. That frees up about 15 to 30 minutes each day for a physician, Baran said.
Refilling prescriptions was the first problem that healthfinch tackled with the award-winning app Swoop. It’s since moved into patient communication, reaching out automatically to patients whom the system finds are overdue for a visit, for example. And its third functionality helps automate the things patients need to do before showing up for a visit.
Baran, who got a master’s degree in biomedical engineering at UW-Madison, co-founded healthfinch in 2011 with Lyle Berkowitz, a Chicago physician who’s the associate chief medical officer of innovation at Northwestern Memorial Hospital.
With the latest fundraising round, healthfinch has raised a total of more than $10 million, and Baran said he expects to have about 50 employees by the end of the year. That would be up from healthfinch’s 29 employees today.
healthfinch’s new platform, Charlie, is named after Charles Darwin. The company’s name is also an indirect reference to Darwin, whose study of finches helped him develop his theory of evolution.
All of those Darwin references, Baran said, stem from healthfinch’s work on the ongoing evolution of electronic medical records. There’s so much data now on EMR systems, Baran said, including the two companies that healthfinch is integrated with: Epic and Allscripts.
And while several companies are analyzing that EMR data, healthfinch has no known competitors who are trying to automate tasks with that data, Baran said.
“You’re seeing an evolution in how EMR integration is handled,” he said. “While it’s still very much in its infancy, it’s something that’s at the core of our product.”
— By Polo Rocha
WisBusiness.com
