winning customers and investors came together quickly, Skievaski says. “It was kind of just this moment of clarity that came upon our team all of a sudden. We knew we were on the right track.”
Of course, 100health wasn’t the first to have this epiphany. It’s getting into an increasingly crowded sector that includes big incumbents like Cambridge, MA-based InterSystems and startups like Moxe Health and, to a certain extent, Catalyze—the latter two also based in Madison.
“The market is big enough that we can all succeed in this,” Skievaski says. “We have a lot of competition here because this problem is so prevalent.”
Bakken—who has invested in 100health, Moxe, and Catalyze—agrees. “There’s such a need out there that there’s plenty of room for two, three, four, maybe even half a dozen [companies] with similar solutions,” he says.
U.S. hospitals and clinics have invested heavily in the digitization of medical records in recent years, driven in part by federal government incentives. Much of that data is communicated between healthcare providers’ various software programs using a system called Health Level Seven International (HL7).
The problem for healthcare app developers is that data—from scheduled doctor appointments to basic patient information—isn’t stored or communicated uniformly across health systems, Bonney says. “If you think of HL7 as a language, each health system kind of had its own dialect. They’ve tweaked and modified it over time.”
100health will set up a secure data tunnel between Redox and a given health system’s software, learning how that system’s HL7 language is different from others. Then it will translate the data into a format that’s compatible with app developers’ software, Bonney says. That way, the app developers “get data the same way they’d get data from a Facebook API or a Google API,” Skievaski says.
The plan is to hit the market with Redox around late January and sign agreements with 20 health systems in the first year, Skievaski says.
100health is working on ensuring Redox is secure, he says, which is always a top concern when working with sensitive patient data. 100health is consulting with healthcare security and legal experts, and the company has hired Brooklyn, NY-based Aptible to host Redox data, Skievaski says. Aptible specializes in cloud hosting that’s compliant with HIPAA rules.
