Osmind, a San Francisco-based startup that built electronic health record software for mental health providers, scored $40 million in a series B round to scale up its technology.
The company's EHR technology is directed towards novel interventions for mental health such as psychedelic medicines and neuromodulation therapies like transcranial magnetic stimulation.
"We're focused on building electronic health record software, which we sell to mental health providers that are seeing patients with moderate to severe mental health conditions The software allows them to better manage their patients and run their practices and also allows everyone to contribute to research for better future treatments," Lucia Huang, CEO and co-founder of Osmind told Fierce Healthcare. "We also work with life sciences companies to analyze some of the data that's being entered into the software."
Osmind will use the funding to continue to develop and scale its EHR technology for breakthrough mental health research and treatment, advance research with new partners and double the size of the team virtually and at the company’s San Francisco office, executives said.
Prior to Osmind, Huang led business and operations at Verge Genomics, a next-generation biotechnology company leveraging artificial intelligence for central nervous system diseases such as ALS and Parkinson’s. Before Verge, Huang was a growth investor at Warburg Pincus, where she made investments to help scale innovative healthcare technology companies such as those developing EHR systems.
"At Verge, I got really excited about where the field of neuroscience and psychiatry are heading. There are a lot of changes that mirror the transformation that oncology has gone through in the last decade or so. When I met my co-founder [Jimmy Qian] a few years ago, we had commiserated around our frustrations with the mental healthcare system, but I think that there's a lot of promise now with some of these new treatments such as ketamine and psychedelic medicine and also new ways of measuring the brain and being gathering data to improve care," she said.
"We ended up founding Osmind over two years ago and have been on a tear in terms of building our software and deploying it in hundreds of clinics now," she added.
Nearly one in five Americans, or 52.9 million people, live with a mental illness. Mental health conditions are one of the leading causes of death worldwide, especially among young adults, and are tied to shortening life spans. Traditional mental health treatments are simply not built to address the unique needs of every patient, leading to great difficulties for patients in navigating the system to figure out what works for them.
Osmind is a public benefit corporation helping clinicians and researchers advance new life-saving mental health treatments.
"We think every healthcare company should be a public benefit corporation and it really allows us to think a lot about patient access to these innovative treatments and to run that alongside our fiduciary duty," Huang said.
DFJ Growth led the series B investment, which brings the total amount of funding for Osmind to $57 million since the company’s founding in 2020. Justin Kao, partner at DFJ Growth and the co-founder of Helix, will join the Osmind board of directors.
In addition to DFJ Growth, the round includes new investors Susa Ventures, Lachy Groom, Brent Saunders (former CEO and chairman of Allergan and current Osmind board member), Helena Goodman and Ariel Katz (CEO of H1 Insights) and existing investors General Catalyst, Future Ventures, Tiger Global and Pear VC.
The Osmind EHR platform is designed for the needs of mental health clinicians, including psychiatrists and other specialties, with tools such as streamlined charting workflows, secure patient engagement and automated outcomes tracking. Clinicians are also part of the Osmind research program, which works with leading scientists to conduct clinical trials and analyze anonymized, aggregated real-world information to advance new diagnostics, therapeutics and precision medicine approaches, executives said.
Many psychiatric providers are using older health IT software or still using pen and paper, according to Huang. "It's difficult because especially with these patients with moderate to severe mental health conditions, there's a lot more oversight that's needed. With some of these new treatments that are coming online, workflows are entirely changing. Existing tooling is just not serving providers well and it's causing them to burn out," she noted.
Osmind aims to provide a better user experience to both the patient and the provider and allow providers to better track and manage patient outcomes. "We automate a lot of patient-reported outcomes and other sorts of data tracking on patients which is really important for this patient population because providers don't want to fly blind between visits. They want to know how patients are doing so they can adjust their care plans accordingly," Huang said.
The healthcare industry is at a "powerful tipping point" in the development of new psychiatric interventions, similar to the precision oncology transformation over the past 20 years, according to Huang.
"There's been so much excitement about mental health and a lot of venture funding that's poured into it. I think what we're really excited about is trying to change the status quo as existing treatments are not working for patients," Huang said. "Many of the current standard of care antidepressants are actually from the 1970s and 80s. To give you a sense of how backdated that is, women weren't even allowed into clinical trials during that time. We're excited about the new wave of treatments and new standards of care that are starting to emerge."
She added, "Our goal is to be the underlying infrastructure for this new wave of mental health treatment. We want to enable every single provider in psychiatry to successfully treat their patients and run their practices and be the 'go-to' EHR and overall software platform for them. And also to be a part of every new drug approval in the space and help all of the research companies who are really trying hard to push for new treatments."
In a research milestone earlier this year, Osmind worked with Stanford University School of Medicine physician-scientists to publish the largest real-world data study on ketamine infusion therapy in the Journal of Affective Disorders. The analysis found that ketamine was a rapid, effective and durable treatment for depression and that over 70% of patients with suicidal ideation at baseline experienced an overall improvement. Findings like these provide real-world evidence for increasing accessibility to innovative mental health treatments, a core part of the company’s mission as a public benefit corporation.
“The renaissance happening in psychiatric treatment today is astounding,” Kao said in a statement. “To see neurology, pharmacology, and physiology all advancing at the same time gives me great hope that we’re at the start of a major transformation for psychiatric conditions that are some of the most deadly and disabling in the world."
Kao added that Osmind supplies powerful technology that’s purpose-built for the acceleration of life-saving interventions, by supporting clinicians treating these patients and the researchers who need high-quality, longitudinal, real-world evidence to develop new therapies.