Nashville, Tennessee-based Axial Healthcare, which makes a suite of products for the chronic pain care space including a patient-facing app, has raised $16.5 million in new funding. Oak HC/FT led the round, and existing investors .406 Ventures, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners, and Sandbox Advantage Fund also participated.

“We are excited to welcome Oak HC/FT into the axial family and look forward to leveraging their extensive healthcare expertise," John Donahue, chairman and CEO of axialHealthcare, said in a statement. "Oak HC/FT’s funding comes as we build out our operational and clinical teams, continue to innovate and enhance our capabilities, and move to operationalize on our substantial pipeline of clients. We look forward to continuing our mission to mitigate opioid misuse and improve the care and well-being for patients in chronic pain.”

Axial Healthcare has four products. The first, axialAnalytics, measures patient risk, clinical outcomes, and a practitioner's performance during an episode of pain. The company has also developed axialNetwork, which measures pain management clinical outcomes, patient satisfaction and episode cost, and axialConnect, which is a patient engagement, monitoring and clinical decision platform. 

The fourth and newest product is axialPatient, a patient engagement app called Empower that helps the patient track their condition and manage side effects and treatments including medications. 

"Patient engagement is incredibly important in effecting and changing patient outcomes," the company writes on its website. "axial knows that patient engagement is crucial to creating better outcomes and care plans for patents with chronic pain. We have developed an application that does more than just manage pain diaries—it collects continuous data on behavior and activity, educates the patient on how to better their pain, and feeds directly to the the physician at the point of care so that doctors never miss a beat."

The company will use the funding to drive expansion of the company's offerings. Nancy Brown, venture partner at Oak HC/FT, will join the company's board of directors. This investment brings the company's total funding to $26.25 million.