Mountain View, California-based HealthLoop, which offers a platform to connect patients with their care team between visits, has raised $8.4 million in new funding. MedCityNews first spotted the SEC filing. Investors included iCarbonX DigitalLife Alliance, NextEquity, Lafayette General Hospital through its Health Innovation Fund, Canvas Ventures, and Summation Health Ventures, CEO Todd Johnson told MedCityNews.
Founded by Dr. Jordan Shlain, HealthLoop helps physicians to stay connected to their patients through mobile and web-based surveys, reminders, and bits of timely information tailored to their particular condition or treatment plan. Physicians get notified if patients are trending toward an undesirable outcome based on their responses or whether or not they are answering the questions at all. In addition to helping to prevent readmissions, HealthLoop can also help hospitals collect patient-reported outcomes data, which they can then use to evaluate and improve their processes.
"As well intentioned as our interventions are with patients, when we throw them back into the world there are a whole series of contextual influences that will pull on them in ways that are incredibly hard to predict," Shlain explained at the Partners Connected Health Conference back in 2014. "But if we build a relationship with them, we can be there throughout the process to support them. And the further we can take that, the better it will be for patients’ lives and the better the outcome will be. The important thing is that the technology exists. What we’re looking for is the imagination and the right healthcare players to recognize that opportunity and embrace it."
HealthLoop has been quietly getting into hospitals around the country over the last few years including Cleveland Clinic and Kaiser Permanente-Southern California. Last summer HealthLoop announced a deployment at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center's Josie Robertson Surgery Center.
“Healthcare should be all about the patient,” CEO Todd Johnson said in a statement at the time. “Patients are the most under leveraged resource in the achievement of better outcomes. They want the best result and to be able to connect to a care team who can check in on them when they’re facing a serious medical concern. We are impressed with MSK’s commitment to provide the best quality of care using innovative technology that can scale this level of high touch patient care for every patient.”
According to the company's internal data, 78 percent of users respond to automated check-in requests 100 percent of the time, and 87 percent of users avoided a phone call or office visit by using HealthLoop. Additionally, a study on patient education published in December showed that patients using HealthLoop outperformed patients who were given paper materials. For instance, 66 percent of HealthLoop users correctly answered a particular question about radiation, compared to just 21 percent of paper material recipients.
