PatientPing, a company that "pings" health providers when one of their patients receives care at another facility, scored a $60 million Series C funding round.
The investment round WAS co-led by Andreessen Horowitz, F-Prime Capital, GV (formerly Google Ventures), and Transformation Capital. It had additional participation from existing investors, bringing PatientPing’s total funding to over $100 million.
The Boston-based startup was founded in 2013 and operates the nation's largest network of admission, discharge, transfer data from hospitals and post-acute care providers, according to the company.
PatientPing supports care coordination by sending admission and discharge e-notifications to providers when their patients get care at another institution so they can provide more coordinated and integrated care to their patients.
This enables providers to drive efficient care transitions in and out of emergency departments, hospitals, post-acute providers, and other care settings. Connecting care teams during clinical encounters can help prevent patients from experiencing poor hand-offs between providers that frequently result in patients spending more time in hospitals and other care settings than they need, the company said.
Its clients include hospitals, accountable care organizations, post-acute care providers, health plans, and behavioral health providers.
PatientPing's network currently includes more than 1,000 hospitals and 5,000 post-acute care facilities and the company has enabled 135 million patient ADT events for 43 million covered lives.
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The company will use the funding to expand to new geographies and extend its capabilities, Jay Desai, PatientPing’s CEO, told Fierce Healthcare.
"Every ADT is an opportunity to help the patient and do everything we can to bring together care providers and services to support the patient," Desai said.
As patients move from the emergency room to the hospital inpatient to rehab to home care, stitching together disparate providers onto one team helps to improve care coordination and can reduce readmissions, according to the company.
The company also is building new ancillary services including a new tool called "spotlights" which uses real-time data to identify utilization and performance trends. That gives providers a faster process to spot trends than waiting for months for claims data.
Another feature called "callouts" enables providers and health plans to improve patient engagement and enroll patients in available programs and supplemental benefits.
PatientPing also rolled out a COVID-19 tool that enables providers to flag and monitor presumptive COVID-19 patients’ admission and discharge data in real-time by alerting providers via text, email and within the web app whenever patients experiencing COVID-19-like symptoms have care events.
The company has been experiencing rapid growth and is well-positioned to take advantage of new federal regulations that mandate data-sharing around patients' hospital admissions and discharges.
A new rule from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) adds a Condition of Participation requiring hospitals to share ADT electronic event notifications with other providers whenever patients have inpatient or emergency department visits.
That requirement will go into effect in July 2021.
"Historically we have spent time and energy convincing hospitals that it’s in their interest to share ADT notifications so other providers know about it. With this new regulation, it's no longer a question if they share this information. It changes the game," Desai said. "We are excited to support hospitals as they deal with this compliance burden. And there are benefits downstream to primary care groups who want these notifications."
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The push to improve care coordination through technology also comes during the COVID-19 pandemic, when sharing real-time information about patients’ care encounters across providers and settings is critical to ensure better, safer, and faster treatment and care transitions for infected and recovering patients, he said.
Having this patient information on hand at the point of care helps providers to make better clinical decisions, according to Aimee Traugh, health regional care management director at UnityPoint Health.
She cites one example of a patient she was monitoring in the emergency department and a notification alerted her that the patient had a history of falls.
"As a result, rather than being admitted to the hospital, a discharge plan was developed for a skilled nursing facility stay. This reduced the ED visit time, prevented a hospitalization, and expedited the admission to the nursing facility," Traugh said.
The PatientPing platform plays such a critical role in the transition of patients between sites of care, said Julie Yoo, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz.
The technology also helps eliminate one of the major blind spots in the country's fragmented healthcare system by longitudinally tracking a patient's care journey across all encounters.
"With the favorable regulatory tailwinds and the need for more resilient care delivery infrastructure coming out of the COVID crisis, PatientPing is well poised to continue leading the market in its quest to achieve better coordination of care," Yoo said.