Startup Brellium built an artificial-intelligence-powered solution that helps providers automate clinical quality and payer compliance.
Brellium co-founder Zach Rosen says his own medical misdiagnosis was an eye-opening experience that demonstrated the impact of documentation gaps on quality of care.
"Years before co-founding Brellium, I had a medical misdiagnosis that snowballed into two years of frustration—shuffling from specialist to specialist, trying treatment after treatment, just to end up with a stack of bills and an endless game of phone tag with insurance. Later, I found out that all of it could’ve been avoided if a couple of boxes had been checked in my chart. I was shocked; something as simple as a documentation oversight had a profound domino effect on the quality of care I received," Rosen wrote in a blog post.
Rosen teamed up with his three co-founders to develop Brellium to help medical clinics automate their chart review to meet clinical quality and payer and billing requirements.
The startup raised $16.7 million in series A funding, led by First Round Capital and Left Lane Capital, with participation from Menlo Ventures, Digital Health Venture Partners, Kearny Jackson and Necessary Ventures. Angel investors also backed the round, including Andrew Adams (CEO of Headway), Steven Gutentag and Demetri Karagas (co-founders of Thirty Madison), Cory Levy (Z Fellows) and Fiat Ventures.
The fresh funding will fuel team growth, product development and broader adoption across healthcare industries like mental health, weight loss, autism and hospice care, the company told HIT Consultant.
Manual chart reviews are labor-intensive and prone to errors and fail to scale with growing patient volumes, company executives noted in a press release.
Brellium says it now supports 250,000 providers across all 50 states, and its customers span behavioral health, ABA, home health, hospice, weight loss, chronic care management and primary care. The startup's customers include Grow Therapy, Rula, Headspace, Hopebridge, Lightfully Behavioral Health and Talkiatry.
Brellium's technology proactively audits every patient visit, identifying compliance risks before they become problems. Providers then receive instant notifications when charts need corrections, complete with clear instructions on how to fix them, according to the company.
"In the unlikely event a payor claws back reimbursement on a Brellium-approved chart, we’ll foot the bill," Rosen said in the blog post.
With Brellium, providers can detect and correct critical issues such as copy-and-pasted provider notes from previous sessions, contraindicated prescription medications, session length discrepancies with what was billed to insurance and flagging decreases in patient condition over time.