Today on Health in 2 Point 00, the big news is about another COVID vaccine… or is it the collapse of the telehealth and digital health market as we know it? On Episode 167, Jess asks me about Bridge Connector shutting down 2 months after getting a $25.5 million raise, UK-based online mental health platform Togetherall raising $10 million, Cerner partnering with Well Health for provider-patient communication services, Solv Health—the OpenTable for healthcare—raising $27 million, and Springtide raising $18.1 million for its clinic and platform for children with autism.—Matthew Holt
On Episode 144 of Health in 2 Point 00, Matthew has gingerly emerged from his office and gone into a Magical Forest! Jess asks me about Healthline media acquiring PsychCentral, the first-ever online psychiatry support group and I explain the history of how it has been passed around from Corporates to PE firms, Bridge Connector getting 25.5M for its interoperability platform, Cecelia Health raising $13M for its chronic condition management service, and Reify closing $30M to help pharma companies run clinical trials from home. Also, we had our first book club discussion with authors Hemant Teneja (VC at General Catalyst) & Stephen Klasko (CEO at Jefferson Health System) on their book “UnHealthcare: A Manifesto for Health Assurance”. Glen Tullman also made a special guest appearance during the discussion. The episode will be released soon! – Matthew Holt
– Bridge Connector raises $25.5 million in Series B funding to advance interoperability layer for healthcare organizations as demand for integrated health data intensifies during COVID-19 pandemic.
– The investment will support the growth of Destinations,
the company’s new integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that connects
health data systems using use-case-based interoperability blueprints to speed
integrations with major vendors.
Bridge Connector,
a Nashville, TN-based interoperability company changing the way health care
communicates, today announced it has raised $25.5 million in Series B funding led
by Axioma Ventures. The round was also joined by all existing investors,
including veteran investor Jeff Vinick, and brings Bridge Connector’s total
funding to over $45 million.
COVID-19 Underscores Growing Demand for Integrated Health
Data
The last decade has seen an explosion of digital health platforms and the U.S. health care system has taken incremental steps toward achieving interoperability between them. In March, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued new rules that force formerly closed vendor solutions to become interoperable.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the urgent need for data liquidity as healthcare providers across the country have struggled to share essential patient information and provide comprehensive care via remote delivery methods such as telehealth. In the face of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on minority communities, the industry has also recognized the critically important role that social determinants of health — the environments in which we are born, live and work — play in our overall well-being and the need to make this information available to health care providers.
A True Interoperability Layer for Healthcare
Founded in 2017, Bridge Connector provides a suite of vendor-agnostic integration solutions and a full-service delivery model, helping health care vendors, providers, and payers more easily share data between disparate systems, such as electronic health records (EHRs) or patient engagement solutions. The company’s technology is designed to democratize health care by allowing organizations of any size to equitably connect data systems and empower care teams with the most accurate patient data in real-time. Unlike other health care interoperability vendors, Bridge Connector’s unique approach does not lock customers into a forced data model or proprietary APIs, instead of employing a vendor-agnostic integration layer that works across data models without the need for standardization.
The investment will further support the company’s increasing
market share in healthcare interoperability and growth of Destinations, a new
integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that connects health data systems
using use-case-based interoperability blueprints to speed integrations with
major vendors.
Recent Integrations with Key HIT Stakeholders
The new funding comes shortly after Bridge Connector finalized various collaborations with some of the most influential stakeholders in health IT, including Epic, Allscripts, and Salesforce, as well as other system integrators such as MuleSoft. Those collaborations represent calculated steps toward creating a centralized hub of integration solutions for all data platforms that any health care provider or payer can access. The average hospital today uses approximately 16 disparate electronic health records platforms that limit data sharing within the walls of a single hospital, let alone between separate hospitals.
