Greenville, South Carolina-based ChartSpan Medical Technologies has raised $3.2 million from a Texas-based syndicate of investors. This brings the company’s total funding to $6 million. ChartSpan will use the funds to hire more than 300 clinical and technology professionals in the next year.

The Iron Yard, a digital health accelerator that incubated ChartSpan, contributed to ChartSpan's previous round. The company was founded by brothers Jon-Michial Carter, who is CEO, and Patrick Carter, who serves as Chief Medical Officer. 

“We had this idea that if we empowered the only entity that is involved in all of your healthcare, which is you, that we would not only have an empowered patient, but you’re the one person who has access to all your healthcare encounters,” Jon-Michial Carter told MobiHealthNews. “…The truth is, these products that are out there, those portals, those mobile apps, they are terrible. But there is a significant amount of the population that wants to be able to manage their healthcare information, their healthcare records, have direct communication with their providers. So that was our initial focus two and a half years ago — to build an interoperable platform, not for doctors, but for patients.”

ChartSpan integrates with a provider’s EMR to collect patient medical information. The patient-facing app allows users to request, organize, and send their medical records. 

On the provider-facing side, the app offers users a way to to automate records delivery, send and receive secure messages from patients, and view an analytics dashboard that aims to give providers actionable patient engagement data. The offering also provides patients with 24-7 access to ChartSpan’s team of medical professionals, who can answer patients’ questions. In the first two years of operation, Carter said, ChartSpan built the analytics platform that it now offers to providers as part of its system.

“You have to have analytics to drive engagement and that’s one of the real problems that providers are realizing now,” Carter said. “Providers bought a bunch of expensive portals and mobile apps, and it’s just software. But software does not engage itself. You can’t put a portal up, put a poster in your waiting room, and expect patients to engage. We built a powerful analytics on the backend of our systems so we can drive usability and engagement every day…Where most providers can’t get 5 percent engagement of their patient population, we average 54 percent engagement of anyone who has ever created an account in ChartSpan.”

A month ago, ChartSpan released a new chronic care management feature. The service, which has no upfront costs for providers, aims to help providers get reimbursed via the relatively new chronic care CPT code that Medicare introduced.

“To launch a chronic care program is a lot of money, from six to seven figures,” Carter said. “We have already done it. So we take a percentage of the amount Medicare pays and we act as the care coordinator for each of our customers. That involves establishing an electronic relationship with a patient — you can also use phone but you can’t use fax and it can’t be in person — and we spend at least 20 minutes, on average 30 to 40 minutes, a month working for that patient to reconcile medications, to develop their care plan, to coordinate their care among other providers, to make sure they have appointments. There are lots of things that Medicare allows us to do and those are the things we do for our providers.”