Home Health Care With $5M investment, Bridge Connector readies new product to tackle interoperability

With $5M investment, Bridge Connector readies new product to tackle interoperability

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Bridge Connector, a tech firm whose products fuse together disparate healthcare IT systems, has attracted a $5 million investment. It is planning to close on even more funding in the first quarter of 2020.

The latest investment will go toward hiring, product development and a move to a larger headquarters, said David Wenger, the company’s founder and CEO. Bridge Connector is focused on addressing the formidable challenge of interoperability in healthcare.

In June 2018, Bridge Connector raised $4.5 million in seed funding led by Axioma Ventures. Later that year Axioma led a Series A round, which raised another $5.5 million. Axioma followed that with a $10 million investment in 2019. Axioma also took part in the latest round.

Based in Nashville, Tennessee, the firm has grown to 130 employees since its founding less than two years ago. Its existing office is 15,000 square feet but it is moving to a 36,000-square-foot space with room for 220 people. The company also has offices in Florida and other states.

Bridge Connector had been planning a Series B round for the fourth quarter of 2019. It decided to delay that to the first quarter of 2020 so it could focus on growth for the remainder of this year, Wenger said in a phone interview. The company, which has raised about $25 million overall, also has upped the target for its Series B.

“It’ll basically double our funding,” Wenger said.

The company is gearing up for the April launch of a product it calls Destinations. The product would allow healthcare organizations to patch together different systems largely without having to do any separate coding or customization, Wenger said. Bridge Connector has been using it internally for about a year.

The product essentially relies on a library of existing connections to configure new ones, he said. If a connection is not in the library, Bridge Connector’s platform can quickly create one using existing documentation. Destinations does not require providers to use an in-house IT team or outside consultants, although the company can provide technical assistance if needed, Wenger added.

“It really just speeds up the time to value for anybody to go live with an integration,” Wenger said.

Interoperability has long been a focus for both public and private-sector players. The field has attracted large tech companies like Amazon, Google and Microsoft, as well as startups. They include Redox, which raised $33 million in a Series C round earlier this year.

Wenger said Bridge Connector’s products are different because providers can use them without having to bring on any additional IT expertise. Other companies in the field are developing APIs, which require coding, he said. Bridge Connector’s products can connect through those APIs, and the company prefers to do so, Wenger said. But it can also work without them.

“We feel that what we have created can help holistically solve the problem of interoperability in healthcare,” Wenger said.

The company’s approach attracted Jeff Vinik, who owns the Tampa Bay Lightning Hockey Team. His private family office led the most recent $5 million funding round for Bridge Connector.

“The last decade in health care has been marked by an explosion of technological advancements and new medical devices that gather an unprecedented amount of patient health data, but the ecosystem of available solutions to collect and connect that data has not advanced at the same pace,” Vinik said in a news release. “Solutions like the Bridge Connector platform will prove crucial in improving patient care by allowing us to leverage these data points to unearth and act upon previously unknown insights about our health and wellbeing.”

Photo: JamesBrey, Getty Images

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