Patient-provider communication platform Luma Health has just announced that it landed $6.3 million in a Series A funding round led by U.S Venture Partners with participation from Stanford-StartX Fund and existing investors, bring the total financing to $9.7 million.
The platform aims to tackle the gaps in booking, scheduling, and communications. One of the key focuses of the company is to remedy the communication breakdowns that result in missing doctor’s appointments, inconsistent follow ups and last minute cancellations. The platform also includes a way for physicians and patients to communicate outside of the doctor’s office.
“Our goal is really to enable the providers to be the patient’s champion by automating all the conversations that are happening when the patient leaves the clinic,” Adnan Iqbal, CEO of Luma, told MobiHealthNews. “So instead of the doctor talking at you in the clinic, the doctor is also having a real conversation with you when you go home and have to carry on your own care path and treatment.”
It can take weeks to see a specialist, but at the same time across specialities doctors have between 15 and 30 percent of time slots open, according to Adnan Iqbal, CEO of Luma Health.
“When we started, that's the problem we aimed to fix -- match patients waiting for care with unused capacity in the clinic,” Tashfeen Ekram, cofounder and chief medical officer, wrote in a post this morning “As we spent more time with clinics and patients, we came to learn that there are disconnects throughout a patient’s entire healthcare journey, preventing patients and providers from getting connecting and starting that journey. What patients and clinics were doing just wasn’t working.”
The team plans to use the money to extend its go-to-market operations. The company will invest in sales marketing and engineering teams. Iqbal said that the company is looking to expand the breath of conversations that the platform can enable across a patients care journey, including pre and post discharge.
A few weeks ago the company launched its two-way communication chatbot, called Care Pathway Messaging. The new services offers a messaging system for patients and providers. At the time Ekram describe the system as the “Swiss Army knife of clinical messaging.” It lets providers send tailored and personal messages to patients that will guide them through their medical journey, he said.
In the future the company plans on continuing to make communication easier for the patient and provider.
“Whether it’s getting in the front door, or getting a referral scheduled, or coming back for follow up care, or knowing what to do before or after a procedure -- all of these lead to gaps in the patient’s care pathway and healthcare experience,” Ekram wrote in this morning’s post. “From the clinic’s perspective, connecting with the patient is labor intensive, prone to error, and often left to chance.”
