LifeNexus, a San Francisco-based startup looking to replace the traditional insurance card with either a smartcard or a mobile app, raised an additional $12.6 million in July, the company told MobiHealthNews. An SEC filing also appeared this week for an additional $1.5 million, which the filing indicates was part of a round begun in July.
UPDATE: According to LifeNexus, "the 1.5M SEC filing related to the issuance of common stock for the conversion of convertible debt."
The $12.6 million round was led by led by private equity firm Camden Partners and two strategic investors: Cambia Health Solutions and Mosaic Health Solutions, Inc. This raise brings the company's total funding to about $25 million, not including the $1.5 million debt conversion. According to LifeNexus CEO David Strand, the funds will be used to scale up the company as well as for additional product development.
iChip, LifeNexus's first product, stores both clinical and administrative information, so it speeds up check-in and serves as a mobile, tethered PHR for patients. Patients can check their own information on an online portal. At the doctor’s office, they slide their card in a reader device from LifeNexus -- or scan a QR code on their app -- to transfer all the data to their provider, who can print it out, access it on a mobile device, or feed it into their own EHR.
"It’s about trying to make sure every healthcare consumer has all of their personal health information available when it matters," Strand said. "We need to get the more and more robust solution that allows for ever more relevant information to be brought to bear. We’re really trying to create a longterm business of highly-personalized, highly specific information that’s relevant to the business they have that day. That means constantly trying to tie in to more databases and present that information in ways that are really helpful for a consumer or for the type of healthcare that’s being sought."
LifeNexus rolled out iChip with its first payor customer -- Amerigroup Nevada -- in March. Since then the company has added another customer, Strand said, a Blue Cross Blue Shield plan. Negotiations are under way with two more Blue plans across the country.
Strand said the company doesn't have immediate plans to integrate with either Apple Pay or HealthKit, but is keeping an eye on both.
"If people in fact move to mobile payments, we will move along with them," he said of Apple Pay. "On the HealthKit side, HealthKit is really to aggregate mostly data coming from apps, but the data that we’re more focused on right now is more relevant to people that have health concerns rather than more fitness-based. In addition, what our technology does is assemble the information for the consumer so you don’t have to do any of it yourself. We think that that makes a huge difference to the usage of the information. So at some point would the integration available on HealthKit be helpful? Sure. We’ve developed the capacity to find information on the consumer’s behalf, whatever database it’s in."
