Hc1.com, the Indianapolis startup focused on healthcare relationship management and data analytics, recently scored $7 million in new capital to expand its presence in the market and drive further adoption of its products, including the company’s software dashboard for analyzing opioid use.
The Series B round was led by Health Cloud Capital with participation from Elevate Ventures, a repeat investor. The 100-person company has raised a total of $45 million from investors since its inception in 2011.
Hc1 turned its attention to opioid data late last year after realizing the crisis was ripe for artificial intelligence-driven analysis, CEO Brad Bostic told Xconomy earlier this year.
On hc1’s opioid dashboard, the company is partnering with drug-testing labs from around the country and examining their anonymized data in search of trends and patterns. (The labs conduct drug tests for employers, law enforcement, and pain management practices.) In the past, there has been data available on prescriptions and overdose deaths, but Bostic says “the whole middle of the story” has been difficult to see.
In April, hc1 announced a partnership with Kentucky’s Appriss Health, one of the country’s largest providers of real-time data related to the prescribing and dispensing of controlled substances. It oversees the state of Ohio’s prescription drug monitoring program (PDMP), for example, along with those in 41 other states and territories.
“Appriss has been in prescription monitoring for a long time and has become the PDMP market leader,” Bostic says. “We both share a passion for using data to drive change.”
As a result of the collaboration, in which Bostic says no money is changing hands, Appriss and hc1 will deliver data and insights to state government officials in order to identify geographic areas where opioid misuse is rising, and attempt to proactively address the issue. Hc1 will provide the analytics dashboard and Appriss will track prescriptions, effectively telling the right hand what the left hand is doing, so to speak.
“It’s all about providing functionality, but also taking information and bringing it together intuitively to drive positive change,” Bostic explains. “It allows us to better detect issues related to misuse and abuse, and deliver the right level of care.”
Both Appriss and hc1 are customers of Amazon Web Services, the retail giant’s cloud computing division. After “seeing synergies,” AWS introduced the companies to one another, Bostic says.
“We came to find it would be a fantastic fit to combine the information sources we were each managing,” he adds.
For instance, he continues, if data shows an area has a high rate of doctors prescribing opioids, yet patients are not testing positive for those drugs, that may indicate the drugs are being diverted. Appriss and hc1 analyze both de-identified population data as well as specific prescribing trends on a statewide basis. The goal is to help clinicians make better decisions and test the effectiveness of current abuse prevention programs, Bostic says.
“It’s a big leap forward in public health tools,” he adds.
The key to the combined offering being sold by Appriss and hc1 is applying machine learning and other A.I. tools to “create a lot more insight to be predictive and preventative. People need to recognize that opioid addiction is not a criminal issue, but a disease state, and we’re looking at factors to predict when and where the disease state might take hold,” Bostic says.
