PatientPing, a care coordination platform that pulls in admissions, discharge and transfer (ADT) data, raised $60 million in funding. The Boston-based company uses this data to alert a patient’s primary care physician if they are admitted to the hospital or transferred to another facility. But ADT alerts can be used to capture other life-saving information.
For example, if the patient lived alone at home and needed support, their doctor could suggest that they might need a home aid. It could also alert them if the patient had gone to multiple different hospitals recently. Patient with dementia or severe mental illness also might not be able to recount their recent health history.
Or, if a patient went to the hospital with Covid-19 symptoms, their primary care physician could follow up with them for care when they go home.
“Usually the ER is where people end up if a lot of other things have failed,” CEO Shiv Rao said in a phone interview. “If the ER provider only has 15 minutes with that patient, sometimes a connection with a community provider can mean life or death for that patient.”
For a patient that went to an emergency room, then a rehabilitation facility, and then received care at home, that makes for a lot of handoffs between different healthcare providers.
“One of the biggest problems between those doctors is they don’t know when care is happening,” he said.
Rao founded the company seven years ago after working for CMS’ Innovation Center, where he helped develop accountable care organizations. Since then, the company has managed to bring more than 1,000 hospitals and more than 5,000 post-acute care facilities on its network, which spans 30 states.
With the new funding, Rao hopes to grow it.
“We’re excited to build out the rest of the network across the country,” he said.
Andreessen Horowitz, F-Prime Capital, GV and Transformation Capital led the series C funding round. The company has raised a total of $100 million to date.
Funding aside, PatientPing will also have momentum as new CMS rules will require hospitals to share hospitalization data by next May. The change was implemented as part of interoperability rules implemented in March, though the deadline for hospitals was postponed as a result of the Covid-19 pandemic.
Despite its benefits, some hospitals have been slow to share ADT data, for competitive reasons or because of the additional time investment. For PatientPing, what worked was structuring its system so information flows both ways.
PatientPing has also built out analytics features that would allow physicians could see which patients were high ER utilizers, or who had been in a nursing home for more than a month.
“To have CMS recognize this need as critical infrastructure around patient care is validating,” Rao said. “It hasn’t been easy since we first got started to get the network that we’ve built and we’re very proud of it. There’s still a long ways to go.”
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