TigerConnect is taking advantage of the growing popularity of telehealth and the need for collaboration tools during the COVID-19 pandemic by closing a $45 million series D investment.
HealthQuest Capital, a growth capital firm that invests in commercial-stage companies, led the investment, which was announced Thursday. Other investors included New Leaf Ventures, Montreux Growth Partners, Norwest Venture Partners, Invus and Industry Ventures.
The 10-year-old company has raised $149 million to date, according to Crunchbase.
The pandemic has delivered an opportunity for companies such as TigerConnect.
“There's been a massive increase in engagement and adoption of our collaboration core product because of the need to coordinate care in such a crazy, urgent time,” TigerConnect co-founder and CEO Brad Brooks told Fierce Healthcare.
The company has grown its revenue more than 30% since March. In addition, since the onset of COVID-19, daily message volume in TigerConnect has more than doubled. Providers spend more than 500,000 hours per month in the app compared with 200,000 in March.
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“TigerConnect is enabling the rapid and secure coordination of care at scale, the need for which has been significantly highlighted by the pandemic," said Garheng Kong, HealthQuest managing partner, in a statement. He added that TigerConnect earned attention as a candidate for investment because of its strong multiproduct platform and “seamless” user experience.
Despite the announcement with HealthQuest, Brooks said TigerConnect was not actively seeking help with funding.
“We were not contemplating to raise money,” Brooks said.
Working with HealthQuest was attractive to TigerConnect because of its impressive knowledge of health systems, care delivery and IT needs, according to Brooks.
“We’ve known them for a while, so it was one of those things that we were able to bring together pretty quickly and feel that they're the right partner for us to help us now enter into this next phase,” Brooks said. “We've now built out a comprehensive platform that is both able to provide collaboration capabilities for internal health system requirements and also extend on the same platform out to the patient by telehealth, messaging, video and voice.”
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With the additional funding, Brooks plans to increase the head count as well as invest in engineering and client delivery.
“There are a lot of things we want to build out in terms of functionality and feature sets for our telehealth offering and then continue to really accelerate investment on the TigerFlow side for collaboration, and all that requires a lot more people,” Brooks said.
TigerFlow is the company’s clinical communication solution that offers organizations an easy way to connect to the electronic health record and manage a wide range of clinical alerts.
The TigerConnect deal is part of a surge in healthcare IT investments in 2020. Investment firm Rock Health forecasts digital health will reach $12 billion in funding by the end of 2020, compared with $7.4 billion invested in 2019.
Improving care collaboration
TigerConnect is a platform that allows doctors, nurses, care teams and patients to communicate securely. The platform enables collaboration for areas such as preadmission coordination, in-patient consultation, EMS services, labs, radiology, pharmacy, discharge and home care. Clinicians use TigerConnect to follow up with patients after surgery or to update family members while a patient is undergoing a procedure.
“There's just tremendous amount of coordination, collaboration, and facilitation of how to take care of patients,” Brooks said.
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The communications platform includes a telehealth solution called TigerTouch and a scheduling app called TigerSchedule that incorporates technology from the acquisition of Call Scheduler, which TigerConnect bought Sept. 1.
The company plans to modernize the antiquated communications platforms in health institutions using the funds from this deal. These older technologies include pagers and fax machines.
More than 7,000 healthcare organizations worldwide use TigerConnect’s platform to coordinate care for patients. These health systems include Geisinger Health System and SingHealth. Geisinger was able to reduce the turnaround time for communicating critical information from seven minutes to one minute, according to TigerConnect.