Plano, Texas-based remote patient monitoring company Vivify Health has raised $17 million in a round led by strategic investor UPMC with participation from Strategic investors Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LabCorp) and Envision Healthcare Holdings.
This round was a completion of a round Vivify Health started in November 2014. This brings the company’s total funding to at least $23.4 million. Existing investors include Laboratory Corporation of America Holdings (LabCorp), Envision Healthcare Holdings, Heritage Group, and Ascension Ventures.
The company’s CEO and founder Eric Rock told MobiHealthNews that prior to founding Vivify Health, he founded two other startups. The first, ProHost was a table management and reservations system that was acquired by OpenTable and the second was healthcare software company MedHost.
“Having been involved with hospitals for 15 years across the US watching patients and providers suffer with the grueling need for improved healthcare services, it was obvious when we saw technology such as the iPhone hit the market that there was a better way,” Rock said. “And simply to use consumer electronics and appropriate mobile devices to engage patients in the comfort of their own home or in their workplace or wherever they may be — it’s essentially healthcare anywhere. With that, when these technologies hit the market we immediately hit the ground running and began building the platform surrounding it. This is not something that can be built in a year or two years. As I know from my past two companies, it takes five plus years to truly build a platform that is scalable and proven. As a result we have over three years of IRB studies that we are now beginning to publish from our customers across the country.”
Vivify Health, which was founded in 2009, has created remote patient monitoring systems that healthcare organizations can use with patients based on their risk level. For high risk patients, which make up about 5 percent of patients, Vivify Health’s monitoring system comes in a kit that includes a 4G tablet and wireless health devices like a weight scale, a pulse ox, and a blood pressure cuff. The tablet offers video conferencing for virtual visits with a physician, health surveys, educational content, and a care plan.
Patients categorized as “rising risk”, which Vivify said make up 20 percent of patients, are given a smartphone-based system. Patients receive a mobile app that is designed to work with all popular smartphones, the company said. Healthcare providers can use the smartphone system to collect data, send health surveys, and video conference for virtual visits. Patients can also access educational videos via the app.
The last group, “at risk” patients, which make up 75 percent of patients according to Vivify Health, are given a web application that is designed for follow up care.
Later this year, in the second quarter of 2016, Rock said Vivify plans to launch an interactive voice response capabilities feature to reach a further audience. The voice response tool will work with anything from a telephone all the way to a smartphone. The service will call users every day with automated voice prompts and walk through a set of questions, the same content that is used in the digital offerings.
Vivify’s product is used by large healthcare organizations that the company says represent 500 hospitals and payers, including UPMC.
“After an extensive evaluation of a number of companies, Vivify Health clearly stood out to us as the one best aligned to deliver patient-centered remote care across UPMC’s integrated payer/provider system,” UPMC Enterprises President Tal Heppenstall said in a statement. “As we deliver care under an increasingly risk-based reimbursement model, we are excited to become a customer, development partner and investor in Vivify’s scalable population health management technology.”
Earlier this year, Vivify announced that it partnered with the American Heart Association to provide patients with AHA’s science-based care plans.
