Major insurer Centene is investing big in the future of healthcare data sharing.
The company led Diameter Health's $18 million series B funding round. Existing investors Optum Ventures, LRVHealth, Connecticut Innovations and Activate Venture Partners also participated. This brings Diameter Health’s total funding to $30 million.
"This new financing validates that our technology is a valuable component to solving today’s challenges of health data interoperability across an enterprise," said Eric Rosow, CEO and co-founder of Diameter Health, in a statement.
“Normalizing, enriching, and integrating data across sources is time-consuming and expensive. Organizations are using our API to accelerate their own data enterprise strategy and are driving real cost efficiencies and value in closing care gaps, more accurately assessing risk, strengthening underwriting, and ultimately improving patient care and outcomes," he said.
Centene's investment signals that insurers see the market value of data interoperability as the healthcare industry moves toward increased collaboration and the use of data analytics.
Diameter Health's ability to automatically integrate and normalize clinical data will play an important role as Centene looks to accelerate innovation and digitization across the company, said Centene Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer Mark Brooks.
Founded in 2013, Diameter Health has built a strong reputation for normalizing clinical data and transforming it into a valuable asset via an application programming interface that enables real-time data exchange, according to the company. Its FHIR-enabled integration engine, Fusion, parses, normalizes and enriches more than 225 million clinical documents on behalf of health information exchanges, the Department of Veterans Affairs, state governments, large health plans and health IT vendors as well as life insurance companies.
The investment comes at a key time of growth for Diameter Health and the U.S. healthcare market as a whole, as recent legislation outlined in the 21st Century Cures Act will accelerate increased collaboration and data sharing across the industry. The recent funding round positions the company to build on its significant momentum in the health plan and life insurance spaces and to advance its mission to enable data interoperability and optimization across an enterprise.
“Diameter Health’s growth is accelerating in the health plan markets at impressive rates. We see the company as being fundamental in supporting the use of data across digital health transactions for healthcare organizations in the future," said Mike Cunningham, principal with Optum Ventures and Diameter Health board member.
Optum Ventures is the independent venture fund of Optum, which is part of UnitedHealthcare.