This week San Francisco-based Ringadoc announced an additional $700,000 in funding for its seed round, which combined with its previously raised $1.2 million, brings its total round of funding up to $1.9 million. While Founders Fund's FF Angel led the round, the new $700,000 comes from Los Angeles-based Siemer VC, Telegraph Hill Group, and Dr. Lyle Dennis, who is the Chief of Neurology at Bon Secours Health System. Additional angel investors include: Practice Fusion Founder and CEO Ryan Howard and Sharon Knight, the former president of concierge medical practice company One Medical Group.
Ringadoc CEO and Founder Jordan Michaels told MobiHealthNews in an interview that the company plans to use the new funding to ramp up sales and marketing of its after-hours, practice management offering. Michaels said that Ringadoc has now helped facilitate north of 100,000 after hours calls to physicians for patients.
As we noted at the beginning of 2013 -- when Ringadoc added $450,000 to its coffers -- Ringadoc planned to use those funds to scale its new offering Ringadoc exchange, develop new patient-facing apps, and to develop a premium service offering that could add video conferencing capabilities to the current voice-only communications offering.
Years ago Ringadoc had plans for its first patient facing app, which enabled patients to record video messages ahead of a virtual visit with a new physician, but Michaels said it has dropped those plans for now and have re-focused on improving after hour phone consultations for patients and physicians.
Ringadoc helps patients have better healthcare customer experience: Patients who already have a physician likely have to deal with an annoying 1970s call center system to get a hold of their doctor after hours, and patients who don’t have a physician might be able to use a service to help them decide whether they should go to the emergency room, the urgent care center, or whether the issue might be handled over the phone.
“Initially we developed a direct to consumer play where patients could go to a bank of doctors that we curated in California to pay for an on demand consultation with a doctor,” Michaels told MobiHealthNews in January. “That is still available and still being piloted in California, but we quickly learned from that those doctors that they wanted to use the same technology with their own patients for after hour calls — not just to attract new patients.”
While Ringadoc used to be based out of Practice Fusion’s offices in San Francisco and has that company’s CEO as an advisor and investor, it has no formal partnership with the company. (Update: Ringadoc moved out of PF's offices earlier this year.) Ringadoc, however, could find a lot of points of integration with EHR providers and others working in the practice management space. Michaels told MobiHealthNews this week that Ringadoc plans to partner with EHR and PM vendors for those types of integrations in the near future.
