[Updated 4/11/18 8:57 a.m. See below.] Healthfinch, a startup whose software automates routine tasks performed by physicians and others who care for patients in clinics, has raised $6 million from investors, says co-founder and CEO Jonathan Baran.
Madison, WI-based Healthfinch has developed applications for tasks like fulfilling medication requests and planning visits to the doctor’s office.
Adams Street Partners, a Chicago-based investment firm, led the round, Baran says. [Updated with information from Jonathan Baran.]
Healthfinch has raised more than $17 million since launching in 2011, the company says.
The applications Healthfinch develops are designed for use in clinics, not hospitals.
The company’s first product was its Refill Management application (formerly known as Swoop). Doctors are frequently assigned to comb through prescription refill requests from patients who take medications for chronic conditions, Baran says. Healthfinch’s software helps physicians reduce the time spent performing this work by allowing them to build rules that look to data points—the date of a patient’s most recent visit or the last time lab work was performed, for example. If all conditions are satisfied, the application grants permission to nurses and other providers at the organization to order refills.
Healthfinch’s other flagship product is its Visit Planning application (née Scout), which is designed to make doctor appointments more efficient by alerting patients ahead of time that they’re due for a particular set of lab tests, for instance. That way, results will be waiting for physicians to review when patients show up for visits, potentially eliminating the need for follow-up appointments, according to Baran.
In order to license Healthfinch’s software, a healthcare provider must be actively using an electronic health records system. The startup has set up integrations with health records software vendors such as Allscripts (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MDRX]]), Athenahealth (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ATHN]]), and Epic Systems, which is based just a few miles south of Healthfinch, in Verona, WI.
Healthfinch’s refill management and visit planning applications are listed on Athenahealth’s Marketplace and Epic’s App Orchard, which the companies set up to function like the app stores created by smartphone software markers, but for the healthcare technology sector. In an interview published by MedCity News last month, Epic president Carl Dvorak said Healthfinch has been “one of the most popular App Orchard participants” since Epic launched the program last year.
Now, with some new funding at its disposal, Healthfinch appears poised to continue refining its products and trying to convince more clinics across the country to install them.
