USA – Avant-garde Health has raised US$12 million in series A funding to support the broad deployment of its surgical care analytics platform, Fiercebiotech reports.
The series A funding round was led by Fulcrum Equity Partners, with Sparta Group and prior investors General Catalyst, Founder Collective, and Tectonic Ventures joining.
CareMeasurement software from the company provides insights to drive down costs while improving patient outcomes across all surgical and procedure-based care areas, according to CEO Derek Haas, a venture that has been seven years in the making.
The Boston-based company began by developing software for knee and hip replacements, then moved on to spine surgery and continued to strategically extend the platform across surgical care areas to ensure the software met the needs of providers across specialties.
“Our goal here is to provide the best insights possible to frontline workers and administrators to help them provide care in the most cost-effective way possible,” Haas said.
“We thought it was incredibly important to build out our solution in a clinically informed way.”
Haas founded the company in 2014, based on research on value-based care conducted at Harvard Business School by professors Michael Porter and Robert Kaplan.
The resulting surgical care software can provide value analyses into care processes such as when to purchase more expensive surgical tools for better outcomes, what operating room team composition results in the most efficient surgeries, and what postoperative care patterns help patients recover faster.
“Most of the time, there’s not a trade-off in the things you want to do to get the best outcomes and doing it as cost-effectively as possible,” Haas said.
The software segments out clinically relevant patient populations for precise analytics, ensuring diagnoses and procedures are disentangled in ways that resonate with physicians, Haas added.
“Patients’ pain and functionality are going to be different in different clinical areas. Those things are important to incorporate into the analytics, so physicians and caregivers feel like they’re getting insights that are most valuable to them,” he said.
Medicare’s bundled payment
While the CareMeasurement software is used in both inpatient and outpatient settings, regardless of the hospital or health system’s payment model, Avant-garde also offers software that caters to Medicare’s bundled payment models to track patient care three months after discharge.
According to Haas, the solution assists organizations in a bundled payment model in predicting bundle costs for each payment and comparing them to target prices set by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
The company collaborates with the majority of Boston’s hospitals, including academic medical centers and community hospitals, in order to serve “as much of the Boston area as possible.”
Gundersen Health System, the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, and Penn State Health Hershey Medical Center are among the clients served by the company.
The company currently has 20 team members and plans to use the funding to more than double its headcount this year across its product engineering and commercial teams.
The funds will also go toward the company’s ongoing research, which, according to Haas, is an important part of their mission to “advance knowledge in healthcare.”
Avant-garde has dozens of articles published in journals such as Harvard Business Review, The New England Journal of Medicine, and JAMA.
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