In healthcare, there’s no shortage of specialized point solutions. Hundreds of companies have built everything from tools that make it easier for patients to schedule appointments, to digital programs for diabetes, sleep and heart health. But how do you get all of these individual components to work together?
That’s the focus of Lumeon, a digital health company that just raised $30 million in funding, led by Optum Ventures and Endeavour Vision. Its platform integrates with electronic health record systems, and pulls in clinical and administrative data from point solutions.
The gist of it, CEO Robbie Hughes said, is that Lumeon’s platform is less about helping clinicians make the right decision, and more around helping them execute those decisions.
For instance, if a patient with heart failure was recently discharged from the hospital, when would be the best time for a follow up call? For lower risk patients, Lumeon says it can manage them autonomously.
“A lot of companies that do a phenomenal job of sending text messages or emails. The hard part is knowing when to send text message or email, to whom and when,” he said. “If I were to give you a list of a million patients where there is something that needs to be done for those patients, how do you operationalize the delivery of that care? It is incredibly hard to bring in 10,000 nurses to ensure you’re calling the right people at the right time with the right message.”
Lumeon, which has headquarters in London and Boston, said it would use the funds to expand in the U.S. One of its clients, New York City’s public health system, used Lumeon to launch a text-based symptom-monitoring program for Covid-19 patients at home.
Optum Ventures and Endeavour Vision led the series D round. Dr. Ash Patel, a principal with Optum Ventures, said Lumeon builds on the fund’s investment thesis that there will be a need for more “middleware” companies to integrate different services.
“Part of our thesis is that in healthcare, there will be a need for infrastructure businesses,” he said in a phone interview. “Most digital healthcare business are being built for extremely verticalized business. But they’re very poor in terms of how they connect to other parts of the healthcare ecosystem.”
Patel said having this infrastructure will be increasingly important as more health systems consider value-based care. With Covid-19 closing or slowing down profitable elective surgeries, many of them are looking for an opportunity to switch to new payment models.
“Large swaths of the U.S. healthcare system are now moving toward value-based care,” Patel said. “It’s incredibly important from a business perspective and a clinical perspective for providers to make sure the decisions they want to implement, get implemented.”
Photo credit: ra2studio, Getty Images
