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Health care API provider Health Gorilla today announced it has raised $15 million in a series B round co-led by IA Capital and Nationwide. The company says it plans to use the funds to accelerate its expansion into new business verticals, including insurance, life sciences, and government organizations, and to introduce new APIs for medical record access, payer-to-payer data sharing, and data quality assessments.
In October 2019, the U.S. 21st Century Cures Act came into force. Signed into law in December 2016, the legislation was intended to drive innovation by requiring that patients be provided access to their information. But opening up electronic health records doesn’t make the data within them standardized. Some experts estimate that as many as half of records are mismatched when data is transferred between health care systems. Tellingly, in a 2018 survey by Stanford Medicine in California, 59% of clinicians said they felt that their electronic medical records (EMRs) systems needed a complete overhaul.
Founded in 2014 by Steve Yaskin, Andrei Zudin, and former Stanford Healthcare business development executive Sergio Wagner, the company is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Health Gorilla, which was originally founded as a marketplace for labs, aims to provide a secure and interoperable product that enables payers, providers, and digital health solutions to share health data and aggregate each patient’s clinical history in one place. With a combination of clinical data APIs, HIPAA-compliant user authentication, and a master patient index, Health Gorilla ostensibly makes it easier for providers to pull a patient’s information from a clinical records system.
Health Gorilla integrates with diagnostic vendors and offers a sandbox in which engineers can code and deploy their own frontends, apps, and workflows powered by the company’s platform. Health Gorilla also offers APIs that let customers retrieve records for public health purposes and electronic case reporting and accept orders and transmit results electronically with providers and developers. The company’s platform can also facilitate collecting medical records to power risk assessment and record consolidation for ordering labs electronically.
Health Gorilla isn’t the only health API provider in town. Another is Human API, which raised $20 million in October to further develop its medical record standardization platform. But Health Gorilla claims its analytics tools set it apart. The company powers visualizations and reporting on data retrieved through its platform or ingested from a database, allowing customers to find population-level trends and relationships, in addition to clinical data anomalies. Data scientists can centralize test results from multiple labs to assess the quality of these records in real time, according to cofounder and chief strategy officer Sergio Wagner, and draw on a network of over 65,000 care sites.
“We use AI to power our master patient index, which matches clinical documents from disparate sources, like different electronic medical records or lab systems, to a single person. This essentially acts as a massive patient registry database, giving health care organizations a comprehensive view of their patient’s data,” Wagner told VentureBeat via email. “Our AI automatically identifies key demographic information in each document ingested, removes duplicate data, and normalizes the data, which health care developers can then integrate into their own workflows. As we process more clinical documentation, our AI performs patient matching tasks at a much higher rate of accuracy than was ever previously possible.”
Companies using Health Gorilla’s analytics tools include Oscar, Virta, Heal, Dr. Chrono, and K Health, among others.
“The pandemic caused many digital health companies to rapidly scale their telemedicine efforts, which in turn resulted in rapid growth of our APIs. Many telemedicine companies like Heal, K health, and Virta Health use our APIs to retrieve data so their providers can treat patients in the context of their medical history,” Wagner continued. “As more health care providers treat patients through telemedicine platforms (instead of commercial EMRs), they rely on our APIs to retrieve medical records and lab data from a vast network of EMRs.”
Aflac Ventures, Epsilon Health Investors, and existing investors — including True Ventures — also participated in Health Gorilla’s latest funding round. The company has 43 employees and has raised nearly $30 million, following an $8.2 million series A round in January 2018.
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