Nashville, Tennessee-based Satchel Health has picked up another $1.5 million in funding, less than a year after its million-dollar angel round. Existing investor NueCura Partners contributed along with an unnamed group of local investors. This brings the company's total funding to about $2.5 million.
“The board’s decision to seek an additional round of funding is a result of an increasing need for better, more convenient care options, particularly in the post-acute care space,” CEO Lanson Hyde, who just took over a few months ago, said in a statement. “This latest investment round validates the work Satchel Health has done to develop a solution to meet these needs, and ensures we will continue to the have the necessary means to further evolve our care platform to address ongoing changes in healthcare delivery.”
Satchel Health is a provider-facing telemedicine company that connects clinicians to patients in nursing homes, skilled nursing facilities, or at home. It uses two-way video as well as connected stethoscopes, pulse oximeters, EKGs, and dermatoscopes. The company also tracks the use of the system and analyzes that data to improve efficiencies and eliminate waste.
When a patient at a post-acute care facility needs immediate care, a nurse logs into the system and completes a dynamic questionnaire. A dispatcher uses that information to select the best clinician for the encounter based on specialty and availability. Then the patient can immediately begin a telemedicine visit with the doctor, using the suite of connected tools to better inform the visit.
The company, which launched in 2015, is deployed in a number of post-acute care sites across the country. It originally operated under the name Octovis and was working on a Google Glass-based offering, but the company pivoted after the leadership realized the limitations of the technology and discovered how ripe the post-acute care space was for innovation, according to a profile in the Nashville Business Journal.