Redox, a Madison, WI-based healthtech startup whose software helps other developers integrate with patient record-keeping systems used at hospitals and clinics, said on Tuesday that it has been selected to join Cisco’s Entrepreneurs in Residence program.
Cisco Systems (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CSCO]]) runs the six-month corporate venture program, which will take place near the company’s headquarters in Silicon Valley. Cisco provides participating startups with financial support and office space, as well as chances to collaborate with the company’s product and engineering teams.
The Entrepreneurs in Residence program is aimed at helping Redox and other early-stage technology companies “accelerate their growth, expand their network, and connect with industry leaders and investors,” according to a news release.
More than 120 software makers have signed up to use Redox’s application programming interface, which brokers connections to healthcare organizations’ electronic health records systems. Last year, Devin Soelberg, Redox’s chief customer officer, told Xconomy that the startup was seeking to increase the total to 500 by the end of 2016.
“Our vision has always been to accelerate the adoption of cloud-based software in healthcare,” Niko Skievaski, co-founder and president of Redox, said in a prepared statement. “We believe that this opportunity with Cisco will help us bring a mature cloud strategy to health system enterprises looking to more rapidly adopt new technology.”
Large health records software vendors, including Verona, WI-based Epic Systems and Kansas City, MO-based Cerner (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CERN]]), have recently had to address criticism that they are closed platforms. Another critique is that for the providers who use the software tools developed by those two vendors and others, records systems can be used to coerce smaller practices into joining their networks.
Startups like Redox, which launched in 2014, have identified the so-called interoperability of systems that store patient data as a problem area in healthcare. (Skievaski and Redox’s other two co-founders are all former employees of Epic Systems.)
Redox has already graduated from three accelerators for healthtech startups: Dreamit Health Baltimore at Johns Hopkins University; TMCx at the Texas Medical Center in Houston; and the Healthbox Studio program in Salt Lake City, which is associated with Intermountain Healthcare.
In October, Redox raised $3.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Boston-based .406 Ventures.
Redox is one of three startups selected into the latest class of Cisco’s Entrepreneurs in Residence program. Also joining is Nervana Systems, which is based in San Diego and says its software can make it easy for customers to use the latest machine learning technology. The other is Menlo Park, CA-based Unravel, whose tools can help developers optimize their code and applications by alerting them when problems arise, or triggering automatic fixes.
