Arizona-based telemedicine platform provider eVisit has raised $2 million from Kickstart Seed Fund, Arizona Founders Fund and angel investor Jeremy Andrus. Previously, the company raised $1 million in July 2016. The latest funding will be used to scale eVisit’s sales, marketing and support teams as they expand.
As opposed to a standalone telemedicine platform, eVisit aims to extend the reach of providers and help them grow their practice by offering them a digital, two-way communication platform to conduct video visits with existing patients. eVisit’s app, available via desktop or mobile, allows providers to treat minor medical issues such as sinus infections or to follow up with a patient who underwent a procedure, plus collect payments, access medical charts for reimbursement submissions, and prescribe medications. On the backend, it also functions for patient self-scheduling.
eVisit was founded in 2013 and reports considerable growth in the past year and a half. The app has reached nearly 225,000 downloads and the platform integrates with more than 20 electronic health records systems.
“Our rapid growth validates the market’s need for better patient/physician communication tools and solidifies our position as the market leader in telehealth software,” eVisit CEO and founder Bret Larsen said in a statement.
Activity in the telemedicine space has been quickly evolving and growing as of late. The recent landmark legislation in Texas solidified virtual care as a significant means of increasing healthcare access, and there are several approaches. For eVisit, the company isn’t taking on the task of hiring their own clinicians, as is Doctor on Demand’s model, or creating vast physician networks like Teladoc and American Well. Instead, eVisit focuses exclusively on partnering with large emergency and hospital medicine groups across the country, accounting for eight million patients. In that way, the company can cater to providers looking to increase revenue and emergency rooms looking to reduce overcrowding due to unnecessary (and often expensive) visits.
“For decades, a large number of patients have relied on emergency rooms for minor medical issues because they can’t get after-hours care from their primary care doctor,” Arizona Founders Fund Managing Director and founder Romi Dhillon said in a statement. “eVisit is the perfect illustration of innovation in the telehealth industry, enabling physicians to recapture patient visits from the emergency room.”