Patient experience platform NexHealth has banked $125 million in a series C funding round, sending its valuation to $1 billion.
The startup aims to provide a seamless digital experience for patients, simplifying tasks like scheduling and messaging while automating back-end administrative processes for doctors and dentists.
The company also offers a universal application programming interface (API) to speed the pace of health tech innovations by making it easier for new products to integrate with electronic health record systems.
Buckley Ventures led the series B round, with participation from angel investors including Lachy Groom, Jack Altman, Scott Belsky, Shreyas Doshi, Eric Glyman, Shahed Khan, Packy McCormick and Rahul Vohra.
“Consumers have frictionless digital experiences when doing virtually anything except visiting the doctor’s office,” said co-founder and CEO Alamin Uddin in a statement about the round. “We’ve come to expect very little innovation in the healthcare world, and NexHealth is here to change that, accelerating innovation in healthcare by connecting patients, doctors and developers.”
Uddin founded NexHealth with Waleed Asif in 2017 after working as a medical receptionist as part of an undergraduate premed program. There, Uddin experienced many of the problems in patient management that NexHealth is now trying to solve.
“How do I integrate my users’ health records into my product? How do I keep the data updated in real-time? What do I do about compliance? These problems have been solved in fintech by Plaid, Modern Treasury, Stripe and many more. But not in health tech,” wrote Uddin in a tweet Thursday.
The fresh capital will power NexHealth’s hiring efforts and the development of new provider-focused features like one-click booking on its platform.
The startup also plans to integrate with more practice management systems and EHRs to expand the scope of its API for customers. Currently, NexHealth manages 68 million patient records.
The company has raised $176 million to date.
“NexHealth has already established itself as the leading patient experience software platform during a critical juncture in the market where the providers who are prioritizing technology are winning,” said Josh Buckley, founder of Buckley Ventures. “We’re excited to partner with NexHealth as they establish the technology foundation on which the future of healthcare will be built.”
Interoperability, at the core of NexHealth’s value proposition, has become crucial to the advancement of health tech, making APIs all the more appealing. The tools facilitate the exchange of data between unrelated software—such as between EHRs and a patient portal—allowing patients to access their aggregated health data in one place.
Despite regulatory advancements, barriers to open data exchange remain, like proprietary data ownership and pay-per-click models for API use.
Value-based care relies on interoperability, though, for the production of analytics that providers can leverage to improve patient outcomes, a critical task as healthcare shifts toward the new reimbursement model.
“Physicians don’t need more data. They need insights,” said Aashima Gupta, director of global healthcare solutions at Google Cloud, during an interview with Fierce Healthcare at HIMSS 2022. “Those insights, if they’re not in the clinical workflows—and that’s where APIs come in—it’ll be very hard for them to become mainstream.”