Healthcare compliance analytics startup Protenus landed $11 million in funding co-led by F-Prime Capital Partners and Kaiser Permanente Ventures, bringing its total funding to $19.4 million.
The Baltimore-based company plans to use the funding to make its health data auditing and privacy monitoring platform available to hospitals across North America.
“Health systems today have big challenges when it comes to protecting patient data,” Nick Culbertson, Protenus cofounder and CEO, said in a statement. “We ask our credit card companies to validate every transaction and alert us to anomalous charges. Why shouldn't we be asking health systems to audit everyone who accesses patient data? Similar principles apply, and the technology is available.”
The company which was founded in 2014, uses artificial intelligence to provide privacy to healthcare teams with the ability to automatically review every access to patient data. The platform makes analytical assessments every time an employee, contractor or affiliated physician accesses health data. It can also use clinically-aware AI to track whether or not it was appropriate for someone to access the data.
“At Protenus, we audit every access, but our customers use Protenus to go beyond auditing,” Culbertson said. “They prevent data breaches and reduce violations of patient privacy, fundamentally shifting the act of protecting patient data from a reactive to a proactive activity. Every patient should have these sorts of protections.”
In July, Protenus announced a $3 million Series A funding round led by Kaiser Permanete Ventures with participation from F-Prime Capital Partners and LionBird Ventures.
The company said this most recent expansion will make the platform scalable and able to reach healthcare providers across the country.
“Patients deserve reassurance that their most sensitive health information is only accessed by people with a good reason to do so,” Robert Lord, Protenus cofounder and president, said in a statement. “We are delighted that F-Prime and Kaiser Permanente Ventures have joined us on our mission to bring our technology to every health system in North America. With their deep expertise in healthcare, cybersecurity, enterprise technology, and artificial intelligence, we could not ask for better partners to continue to scale our vision.”
