Boston-based PatientPing, which makes a care coordination platform that alerts healthcare providers whenever a patient receives care elsewhere, has raised $31.6 million in Series B funding in a round led by Andreesen Horowitz and Leerink Transformation Partners. Previously, the company raised $9.6 million, and this lastest round brings the PatientPing's total funding to $41.2 million. 

The funding will be used in a number of ways: hiring more staff across multiple departments, expanding services into new geographic locations, and further developing Patient Ping’s offering.

The company’s product is a clinical event notification platform that sends real-time messages (“Pings”) to providers whenever their patients are admitted, transferred to or discharged to or from a facility. The goal is to coordinate patient care as seamlessly as possible, and PatientPing’s service works across the entire continuum of care – acute, ambulatory and post-acute facilities.

PatientPing has a nationwide network of more than 15,000 providers and serves markets in Massachusetts, Connecticut, Michigan, Pennsylvania, Vermont and New Hampshire. In August, the company partnered with UMass Memorial Health Care system.

"We are just getting started," PatientPing Founder and CEO Jay Desai said in a statement. "It's an important moment in history to modernize our country's healthcare IT infrastructure and we're thrilled to partner with the world's most innovative investors from both coasts to support us on our journey.”

The service is also agnostic to EHRs, provider networks or other organizational barriers that create silos between parties. One a provider encounters a new patient, they receive care instructions along with their Ping that includes contact information for other members of the care team as well as the patient’s visit histories.

“For example, if a patient lands in a hospital in Florida when their primary care team is at home in Massachusetts, we're making it seamless for those providers to work together so the patient gets the best possible care,” Desai said. “We're going to accelerate expansion to new regions and dramatically increase our investment in our product to continue delivering on our aim of seamlessly connecting providers to coordinate patient care."

Investors said they were attracted to PatientPing for its strategy of linking healthcare team members at a time when lack of coordination within the care system results in adverse patient care and wasted money.

"We have an incredibly fragmented health system where up until now healthcare providers had no idea where their patients come from or where they go after care," Todd Cozzens, managing partner at Leerink Transformation Partners, said in a statement. "For the first time, PatientPing solves this problem by creating a dense network that knows where every patient is in the healthcare ecosystem, and provides this extremely valuable information back to individual providers to understand their markets and patient populations better and be in a position to increase efficiency, focus resources and keep more care within their own system."

In addition to the patient-centric approach, the company has also attracted investment because of the many different people and organizations it connects, which gets at the systemic root of the problem.

"I am a huge fan of businesses that have a network attached to it, and see huge potential for PatientPing to become an important business in the healthcare space," Andreesen Horowitz Partner Jeff Jordan said in a statement.