PeraHealth, a Charlotte, North Carolina-based healthcare data analytics company, has raised $14 million in first-round funding from Mainsail Partners, a growth equity firm. 

"PeraHealth is a clinical decision support company. We’re providing patient surveillance tools and systems to hospitals to really monitor patients to catch very severe types of things that can happen to a patient," CEO Stephanie Alexander told MobiHealthNews. "Early warning systems for things like sepsis. We’re using it to monitor all patients throughout the hospital. The tools themselves are embedded in the EHR software for all the health systems. So physicians, nurses, other clinicians can be warned so they can intervene early."

The company has a number of monitoring and analytics tools including PeraMobile, which sends warnings and data on at-risk patients to care providers' mobile devices. PeraHealth generates early warnings based on data that's already in the EHR and the system is accessible via the EHR, so it doesn't add extra steps or additional workflow for providers, Alexander said.

"We have almost 20 peer-reviewed publications and our early warning is much more timely than the few systems that are out there that are mainly algorithms without tools," she said. "So for example we will detect a deterioration 24 to 48 hours before and, in some cases, seven days before other systems will. The [other] main area [where we stand out] from a scientific standpoint is we don’t have the false alerts that are out there. We’re not sending physicians to patients they don’t really need to go see."

As a growth equity investor, Mainsail Partners will give the company a lot of hands-on attention, Alexander said, and PeraHealth will benefit from a "strong operations team and strong healthcare and technology expertise".

Currently, PeraHealth is in more than 80 hospitals including a range of different kidns of customers: academic hospitals such as Yale New Haven, children’s hospitals such as Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, larger health systems like the Houston Methodist System, and some small community systems. Other customers include Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center and Mission Health. The system also works with all the major EHRs.

"Our focus is to provide more resources to our hospitals to get more improved outcomes," Alexander said. "Today our health systems have documented 40 percent improvement in mortality. That is our focus: To get our health systems as much support as possible in adoption of the tool. That will improve not only services we provide but also development of additional services."