Home Health Care New York primary care startup K Health raises $25M Series B

New York primary care startup K Health raises $25M Series B

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New York City-based K Health, the primary care startup looking to create an AI-driven triage and symptom checker tool has raised $25 million in a Series B from investors including 14W, Comcast Ventures and Mangrove Capital Partners

The new capital builds on top of a $12.5 million Series A earlier this year and will be directed at expanding the company’s platform which is meant to provide more relevant and personalized health information to patients.

K Health’s free application – which the company claims has more than 500,000 users – is built on a clinical record database licensed from Israeli managed care organization Maccabi that contains 2 billion health events collected over the past 20 years. The 50-person startup was founded in 2016 and launched their application earlier this year.

Users answer a three to four minute questionnaire about their demographics, medical history and symptoms and K Health’s model whirs into action to predict what condition could be afflicting the patient and what the best route of care may be.

The company’s technology is a major leap up from Dr. Google or the decision-tree models used by first generation symptom trackers like WebMD due to the use of AI analysis to connect disparate data points and highlight risk factors.

K Health CEO and co-founder Allon Bloch said the company has developed  indications for about 200 different primary care conditions and is continuing to expand its capabilities across specialties like pediatrics and orthopedics.

The new capital will be directed at building out the company’s platform and launching in-app virtual visits starting in 2019.  Thew new feature will allow users to directly connect to a primary care or ER doctor at prices “below your copay,” according to Bloch.

To be sure, K Health is not the only startup operating in this space and competitors include Boston-based Buoy Health and Barcelona-based Mediktor. Where K Heath stands apart, according to the company, is in the richness of its foundational data set.

K Health has built relationships with around 40 New York-based providers as well as its own roster of physicians informed by their primary care platform. By feeding health and clinical care information back into the company’s technology, the idea is to create a longitudinal data set for patients that will result in even more personalized and effective healthcare.

“We built a system that’s closed loop and captures not just when you go to the doctor, but when you feel good and when you feel bad,” Bloch said in an interview.

The logic follows that patients armed with more contextualized information about their health conditions can therefore make smarter and more cost effective decisions about the clinical care they require.

In Bloch’s vision for the company, K Health can create an efficient and data-informed automated triage system to direct people to best pathway for their care.

For example, with thousands of people be checking their symptoms on K Health’s app during flu season, the company’s technology can pinpoint the select patients that could benefit from a telemedicine consult or an in-person clinic visit to head off more serious complications.

He contrasted K Health’s model to that of an urgent care clinic which can address a patient’s chief complaint, but doesn’t serve to improve the person’s overall understanding of their health and the steps needed to be taken to maintain it.

“Healthcare tends to be episodic, a hammer, then a nail. If you’re not feeling well you get medication and if you don’t come back we assume that it worked,” Bloch said.

“Using our long historical data set, we’re trying to capture a person’s healthcare journey and using that to do personalized preventative care and avoid stuff before it starts.”

Credit: Getty Images, pixelliebe

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