Hospitals often try to improve their services by getting direct feedback from customers—their patients. But even when patient surveys are electronic, many patients decline to respond to all of the questions, if they bother to respond at all.
Bivarus is addressing that problem with a software platform that simplifies the patient’s experience while giving hospitals, clinics, and physician practices powerful analytics to make best use of the information that patients do share. Now the Durham, NC, startup has raised $1.9 million to help the company grow. Excelerate Health Ventures, based in Research Triangle Park, NC, led the Series A round.
Some hospital surveys can consist of as many as 100 questions. The Bivarus offering limits questions to 10. But the company says its software makes sure that each patient is asked to respond only to the 10 most important queries, which the software determines dynamically using an algorithm that takes into account the relative importance of a measure as well as prior observations. Survey questions can be customized to each healthcare facility.
Patients don’t need any sophisticated software to respond and the surveys can be taken over e-mail or by text message. Bivarus says that response rates with its software are 30-60 percent higher than traditional survey methods, depending on the clinical setting. The Bivarus software also offers tools that enable healthcare providers to crunch the information, produce reports, and determine actions based on survey responses. The cloud-based software is available by subscription; the price is prorated, depending on the number of estimated patients a facility sees each month.
Bivarus was co-founded in 2012 by Seth Glickman, director of the Office for Population Health and Value at UNC Health Care, and Kevin Schulman, professor of medicine at Duke University. The company is led by CEO David Levin, who previously served in executive roles at Morrisville, NC, contract research organization Clinipace Worldwide, and MercuryMD, a Durham developer of mobile software that was acquired by The Thomson Corporation in 2006.
