Avant-garde Health has raised $12 million in series A funding to power the general rollout of its surgical care analytics platform.
The company’s CareMeasurement software provides insights to drive down costs while improving patient outcomes across all surgical and procedure-based care areas, a venture CEO Derek Haas told Fierce Healthcare has been seven years in the making.
The Boston-based company began by building the software around knee and hip replacements then moved to spine surgery and continued to extend the platform strategically across surgical care areas to ensure the software fit provider needs across specialties.
“Our goal here is to provide the best insights possible to frontline workers and administrators to help them provide care in the most cost-effective way possible,” Haas said. “We thought it was incredibly important to build out our solution in a clinically informed way.”
Haas started the company in 2014 based on value-based care research at Harvard Business School led by professors Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan.
The resulting surgical care software can offer value analyses into care processes, such as when to buy more expensive surgical tools for better outcomes, what team composition in the operating room results in the most efficient surgeries and what postoperative care patterns help patients recover faster.
“Most of the time, there’s not a trade-off in the things you want to do to get the best outcomes and doing it as cost-effectively as possible,” Haas said.
The software segments out clinically relevant patient populations for precise analytics, ensuring diagnoses and procedures are disentangled in ways that resonate with physicians, Haas added.
“Patients’ pain and functionality are going to be different in different clinical areas. Those things are important to incorporate into the analytics, so physicians and caregivers feel like they’re getting insights that are most valuable to them,” he said.
While the CareMeasurement software is used for inpatient and outpatient settings regardless of the hospital or health system’s payment model, Avant-garde also offers software catering to bundled payment models under Medicare to follow patient care three months post-discharge.
The solution helps organizations in a bundled payment model predict bundle cost for each payment and compares them with target prices set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services, according to Haas.
“We want to be able to help support people both while the patients are in the hospital and post-discharge, and see that as inextricably connected over time,” he said.
Haas said the company works with the majority of the hospitals in Boston, including academic medical centers and community hospitals, to serve “as much of the Boston area as possible.”
The company also provides its solutions to clients across the country including Gundersen Health System, University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences and Penn State Health Hershey Medical Center.
Fulcrum Equity Partners led the series A funding round, joined by Sparta Group and prior investors General Catalyst, Founder Collective and Tectonic Ventures.
With 20 team members at present, the company plans to use the funding to more than double its headcount this year across its product engineering and commercial teams.
The capital will also support the company’s ongoing research, which Haas said is an important part of their mission—“to advance knowledge in healthcare.”
Avant-garde has published dozens of articles in journals including Harvard Business Review, The New England Journal of Medicine and JAMA.