Seamless Medical Systems, a 2-year-old Santa Fe, New Mexico-based startup, has announced a cumulative seed funding raise of $2 million. The money comes from individual, local angel investors, according to CEO and founder David Perez, about a third of whom are physicians themselves. The company is hoping to raise an additional $3 million this summer, Perez told MobiHealthNews.
Seamless currently has one product, an iPad patient check-in platform called SNAP Practice. Perez said the company currently has about a dozen customers, all private practices, although some hospitals, including a military hospital have expressed interest.
"I basically got started because I was a patient and I was sitting in the waiting room in my doctor's office and had this clipboard and this stack of papers I was filling out," Perez told MobiHealthNews. "And I got to the fifth piece of paper, filling out my social security number for the fifth time, and I just thought 'There has got to be a better way.' That's when it really dawned on me that I could fill in all that information on the iPad, I could read those magazines on the iPad, and I'd probably be more willing to read about medical information on my iPad."
Currently SNAP Practice is loaded onto dedicated iPads that are handed out to patients in the waiting room in lieu of clipboards. Patients can fill out their intake forms on the iPads and read magazines, as well as access health information content, provided by Mayo Clinic. In version 2 of the software, the app will contain a virtual health magazine, customized to the user by age, gender, and health condition. The company is also hoping to create a Spanish version.
Seamless's offering is similar to that of NYC-based startup Phreesia, which has been in the space since 2005, although Phreesia uses a dedicated tablet rather than an iPad. Another company, Digital Assent, offers a similar dedicated patient check-in tablet called PatientPad.
Future plans for Seamless include moving the patient engagement outside of the doctor's office entirely. The goal, Perez said, "is to be able to reach [patients] outside the walls of the clinic. Pick up signals from wireless glucometers and blood pressure cuffs and send that information back to the EHR. Patients can have their own account called SnapForMe. This will allow patients to be empowered with access."
Perez says he wouldn't describe the product as an app, although it can be downloaded from the App Store. "It's a cloud-based enterprise software that runs on an iPad," he said. "We do have an Android version in the works for early next year, and Microsoft Surface we have in our sites as well."
