In 2014, the startup accelerator Healthbox launched a program in Salt Lake City in partnership with Intermountain Healthcare, a network of hospitals and clinics headquartered there.
The following year, the accelerator graduated a class of startups from its Healthbox Studio program that included Madison, WI-based Redox, which develops software that enables healthcare applications to exchange data with electronic health records systems used at organizations that provide patient care.
Now comes news that there are new dimensions to the Intermountain-Redox relationship.
For one, the healthcare provider has invested $1 million in the startup through the Intermountain Healthcare Innovation Fund, which is managed by Healthbox. Redox is counting the money as part of the Series B financing round it closed in January, bringing the value of the round to $10 million. Intermountain did not invest in Redox when the startup went through Healthbox Studio in 2015, says Devin Soelberg, chief customer officer at Redox. (That year, the accelerator announced it was tweaking the format of Healthbox Studios so that participating companies wouldn’t be required to give up equity at the start of the program.)
Separately, Redox says it will become part of Intermountain’s “commercialization strategy,” which involves getting other hospitals and clinics to install and begin using applications that employees at Intermountain have developed internally. Soelberg says he will be the one overseeing Redox’s collaboration with Intermountain.
“We seek out the people that are improving healthcare and our strategy is to help them extend their innovation to more patients, faster,” Soelberg says. “Intermountain is … in a position to extend their standard of care out to other organizations. That’s something that we want to be part of, principally. And the role of [data] integration in that is really important.”
One application that was developed in-house at Intermountain is Rehab Outcomes Management System, a Web-based software tool aimed at helping physical therapists make better, more personalized decisions. This is done in part by allowing patients to self-report certain information, such as their pain levels.
Redox’s core product is an application programming interface that lets healthcare applications send information to—and receive it from—electronic health records systems. The API is a set of software tools aimed in part at improving “interoperability.” That term refers to the ability for health data to flow seamlessly between healthcare providers, and to and from outside applications.
“Redox is quickly becoming a standard in application interoperability,” says Vivek Reddy, chief health information officer at Intermountain Healthcare, in a prepared statement. “Their platform has evolved into the largest network of enterprise healthcare applications with the ability to scale innovations across large health systems like ours.”
Redox has said its API can be used to talk to software developed by a host of leading vendors, including Allscripts (NASDAQ: [[ticker:MDRX]]), Athenahealth (NASDAQ: [[ticker:ATHN]]), Epic Systems, and McKesson (NYSE: [[ticker:MCK]]). Another vendor whose software is widely used is Kansas City, MO-based Cerner (NASDAQ: [[ticker:CERN]]); Intermountain says on its website that it has been configuring its patient records system, which it calls iCentra, with Cerner.
Soelberg says that Intermountain isn’t the first health system Redox has teamed up with to bring applications developed internally at the health system to other organizations. However, this is the first time Redox has shared details publicly on such a relationship, he says.
