The idea of starting Healthie, a software company meant to help healthcare companies and startups handle back-office operations, came to co-founder Erica Jain after witnessing her parents struggle with weight loss but lack of access to a comprehensive care team.
“What Healthie is building is akin to the way that Stripe changed the way e-commerce companies were able to take payments online with a single line of code,” Jain said in an interview with TechCrunch. “And that is effectively a very interesting notion because we’re still top of the first inning when it comes to what healthcare innovation is going to look like in the coming years.”
The company provides their customers with templates they can customize to fit their needs all while allowing companies to provide users with virtual engagements.
According to a report from the University of Southern California Sol Price School of Public Policy, 35 million people in the country lack basic healthcare access due to cost and lack of accessibility.
Additionally, since the beginning of pandemic, close to 22% of Americans use telehealth services, according to the Office of the Assistant Secretary for Planning and Evaluation.
Healthie also said they have been profitable for the past few years. For the fiscal years of 2020 and 2021 they operated with FCF, EBITDA, aEBITDA and GAAP net income. The company officially launched in 2016 and has been FCF net income profitable since 2018.
Healthie announced a $16 million Series A led by Velvet Sea Ventures with participation from Greymatter Capital, Watershed, Builders VC and a customer syndicate. The company said that despite landing the new cash infusion, they “had more money in the bank than capital raised to date, supporting a large and growing team.”
“The reason we decided to take on additional capital and found great partners is that we saw there’s [ … ] a moment of innovation in healthcare that’s … happening right now,” Jain said. “COVID forever has transformed the way that consumers expect to receive healthcare and has ushered in this new era of how healthcare can and will be delivered.”
In total, the company has raised $17.9 million and will use this round’s funds to continue developing their software.
Currently, more than 2,000 organizations use Healthie’s services and the company stores upward of 1.3 million patient records.
Digital health companies Talkspace and BetterHelp have been under watch as the Senate is reviewing potential privacy rights violations related to data mining. The companies have been asked to provide clarification on their data collection and sharing policies after reports alluded that the companies could be sharing data with Meta and Google.
Healthie claims they are HIPAA compliant and say they try to ensure data privacy. The company said they provide the templates for data and HIPAA compliance (which can be customized) to their customers in order to inform patients once using their interface. However, how a patient is let known about their policies can vary by each partner.
“Data is our customers’ data. It’s not Healthie’s data, and that is true day one, and it’s true today,” Jain said.
Although the company does have large adoption in the industry, health companies can still establish their own electronic health record systems. Companies like Athenahealth, Center and Epic already exist in the space, but according to Jain they are very “medically driven, and very billing driven.”
The same sentiment was echoed by Kass Lazerow, partner and co-founder Velvet Sea Ventures, who invested in Healthie.
“If you look at other competitors they’re just legacy EMR. Platforms with big limitations, no product user interface, very hard to use. And they’re built around the wrong principles,” Lazerow said.
For Jain, she said they hope Healthie will be the “underlying infrastructure for next generation virtual care.”
“We’re here to change the way that healthcare is being delivered because the way that it’s been delivered for so long is broken,” Jain said. “And that’s been at the sacrifice of patient care and outcomes.”
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