Cambridge, Massachusetts-based healthcare provider Iora Health raised $28 million from Foundation Medical Partners, Rice Management Company, GE Ventures, and Khosla Ventures as well as existing investors .406 Ventures, Fidelity Biosciences, and Polaris Partners. This brings the company's total funding to at least $48 million.
Iora Health plans to use the additional funding to double its size in 2015. Iora currently manages 11 primary care practices in six states.
The company works with self-insured employers and unions to create special private practices for their highest-risk, highest cost members. Those patients don’t pay a copay and don’t have a doctor as their primary contact point with the care system. Instead, each patient has a care team — a health coach who communicates with the patient most, a behavioral health specialist, a nurse, and a doctor.
Iora also offers a care portal to support the patients and open communication between patients and their care teams. Patients can access their own medical records and share notes through the portal, which is also designed for mobile browsers.
The notes feature, Iora COO Alexander Packard explained at an event last year, aims to create more transparency between patients and providers.
“Increasingly, we’re going to build in more and more visibility of the notes, because the more patients are engaged — [Asking] what drugs am I on? What is my blood pressure, What is my HbA1c? — the more they know the answers to those questions or even what questions to ask, the more they care about themselves, and the more they have agency or self-efficacy,” Packard said at the time. “So we’re on a path to create transparency with the medical record so the patients really feel like they own it, too.”
Iora also developed a new patient segmentation tool at the end of last year for population health.
"I can now plug in certain metrics that I want to see within my patient panel: Who has a BMI out of range, smokes, has had a blood pressure reading higher than 140/90 and is over the age of 40? POOF — a lovely spreadsheet with the patients that fit my criteria pops up," C. Leigh Goldsmith, an Iora Health health coach describes in a blog post. "I can filter folks by a plethora of different criteria combinations. I can look at their charts and see if I notice any trends."
In September 2014, Iora partnered with Humana to launch four primary care practices – two in Phoenix and two in Seattle -- for Medicare Advantage members.
