Electronic health record startup Canvas Medical scored $17 million in series A funding to expand its health plan partnerships and fuel the growth of its value-based care software.
The company, founded in 2015, provides a cloud-based digital health platform for primary care practices as well as accountable care organizations and independent physician associations. Canvas' EHR capabilities include scheduling, charting, telehealth, e-prescriptions, lab orders, population health analytics and outreach as well as full revenue cycle management workflows, according to the company.
San Francisco-based Canvas developed the platform to help doctors experience a more efficient approach to delivering value-based care, the company said.
The financing was co-led by Inspired Capital and IA Ventures with participation from IronGrey as well as previous investors Upfront Ventures and iSeed.
The company also scored a new partnership with insurance giant Anthem. The two organizations are working together on a technology integration designed to accelerate value-based care nationwide—bringing Anthem’s machine learning insights to providers directly within Canvas workflows.
RELATED: Penn Medicine CEO: COVID-19 financial crisis is 'clarion call' to move to value-based models
Designed to help doctors and insurers collaborate on high-quality patient care, Canvas software replaces traditional electronic health records, practice management systems, telehealth tools and myriad bolt-on applications with one unified system, purpose-built for value-based care.
Data scientist Andrew Hines, founder and CEO of Canvas Medical, set out to develop a "human-centered EMR" that would enable better clinical decisions and patient care as well as an achievable work-life balance for clinicians.
Hines was moved to action by the burden typical EHRs place on clinicians based on watching as his wife, a family nurse practitioner, wasted hours of their family time finishing medical charting, according to the company's website.
Hines and his team wanted to build an EHR that utilizes clean, structured data in an intuitive, human-centered format to deliver better patient outcomes and better quality of life for primary care clinicians and their care teams.
Historically, independent primary care practices have had to rely only on the data they enter in their EHR systems. They rarely have visibility into what other healthcare providers are diagnosing or what outside treatments have been received by any given patient. Through Canvas insurer connectivity, providers can monitor patient care across all settings and manage higher-risk and higher-utilization populations with timely and personalized interventions, according to the company.
RELATED: Elation Health nabs $40M series C to ramp up support for independent primary care practices
Startups that support primary care practices are attracting more venture capital investment. Elation Health, which provides a clinical technology platform for independent primary care practices, raised $40 million in a series C financing round in December. Aledade, the startup company that is working to reshape primary care, scored a $100 million series D funding round in January.
Canvas is engineered to support all insurers simultaneously in the same way physician practices take care of patients with different insurance plans.
“Physicians in every corner of the country have told us they need better technology to succeed in new payment arrangements with their insurance partners. Not just faster software that's easier to use, but smarter software," Hines said. "Leading insurers know their longitudinal data is key to building smarter clinical systems, and they know a reimagined EHR is the ideal context for those insights to empower clinical teams day in and day out.”
As physicians manage an unprecedented public health crisis and persist in their evolution to new payment models, effective technology has never been more important.
“Canvas’s strength comes not only through reducing the administrative burden on independent clinicians, but by helping PCPs and insurers work together to keep people healthy and improve outcomes,” said Mark Batsiyan, partner at Inspired Capital, in a statement. “Improving our healthcare infrastructure has never felt more urgent, and Canvas is poised to build a better system from the technology layer up.”