(From left to right): Intus Care Co-founders Alex Rothberg, Robbie Felton and Evan Jackson
Intus Care, a predictive analytics platform designed to improve care outcomes among geriatric patients, closed a $14.1 million Series A funding round on Wednesday. The round, led by Deerfield Management, brings the company’s total funding to more than $19.5 million.
The startup was founded in 2019 by three undergraduate students at Brown University: Robbie Felton, Evan Jackson and Alex Rothberg. Felton, Intus’ CEO, was studying public health with a focus on Medicare and Medicaid programs, and he was particularly interested in how these programs could improve to better take care of vulnerable patient populations.
Felton’s choice of study stemmed from the time he would spend with his mother growing up, he said in an interview. His mother was a geriatric social worker in Detroit, and she would often take him along with her on home visits to see her elderly and disabled patients.
Felton said he spent many hours as an adolescent volunteering at her center once she became the executive director of a Program for All-Inclusive Care for the Elderly (PACE). These CMS programs are designed to provide comprehensive medical and social services to elderly patients, most of whom are dually eligible for both Medicare and Medicaid.
When Felton came together with Jackson and Rothberg to create Intus, they decided the mission would be to improve the way PACE programs use their data so they can maintain and enhance the quality of care they provide.
“These organizations have access to a lot of data — they’re documenting information in their health record, they’re documenting information on claims and documenting information on finances,” said Jackson, who serves as Intus’ COO. “But there’s no great way to pull that data together through these disparate sources to leverage the insights that PACE programs need to provide the highest quality of care for seniors — and ultimately keep seniors out of the hospital and in their home or community-based settings where they’re more comfortable.”
The startup’s digital platform integrates with EHRs, claims software and accounting software. Jackson pointed out that it’s difficult for care providers to glean insights or make decisions when all their data is living in separate places. When Intus brings together this data into a single view, he said PACE programs can get a better picture of how they are performing — not only from a high level as an organization, but also on a granular level for each individual patient.
Intus’ technology promises to help PACE programs decrease preventable healthcare utilization events and measure the impact of quality interventions, as well as equip them with actionable insights to make informed decisions about to best improve patient care.
“We’re helping programs taking care of low income, older adults, and scale the quality of care that they want to provide so they can go from taking care of 100 participants, to taking care of 1,000, then 100,000 then eventually millions,” Felton said.
The startup has sold its technology to almost 40 PACE programs across 14 states, according to the co-founders.
Intus is hoping to expand its reach, and its Series A funds will help it do so. With the money it raised, Intus plans to scale the capacity of its technology and grow its employee base on the engineering and marketing side of things.
But Intus isn’t the only company out there that promises to improve seniors’ health outcomes. For example, Roobrik provides online tools to help seniors and their caregivers make informed healthcare decisions, as does Honor. And there are plenty of companies that focus on delivering actionable data insights to providers, including big names like Innovaccer, Sema4 and GE Healthcare. Intus differentiates itself with its focus on the vulnerable populations who participate in PACE programs, according to Felton.
“PACE is very insulated,” he said. “Other kinds of data platforms and software platforms haven’t quite made an entrance into this space yet. It’s also a smaller market in terms of the total membership, so there’s a lot of white space for us to build new things.”
Photo: Timothy Sullivan
