BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Abacus Insights, a leading data integration and interoperability platform that enables health plans and their providers to create a more personalized healthcare experience for consumers, today announced it has raised a $35 million Series B round from new and returning investors. The latest round was led by new investor, Blue Venture Fund, and joined by returning investors CRV, .406 Ventures, Horizon Healthcare Services Inc., and Echo Health Ventures, a strategic collaboration of Cambia Health Solutions and Mosaic Health Solutions. The debt facility was provided by J.P. Morgan.
The funds will be used to scale the business, accelerate the capabilities and connections of its technology platform, and add to its roster of technology talent. The financing brings the under three-year old Boston-based company’s total venture backing to $53 million.
“The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the critical importance of reliable health data in managing disease and patient care,” said Mike Spadafore, managing director of the Blue Venture Fund. “Health plans play a leading role in this effort as the caretakers of the broadest spectrum of patient health data -- across primary and specialty care, hospitals, pharmacy, labs and wellness programs. Today, however, the ability to view and responsibly make use of that data to improve healthcare is too often obscured by the silos in which the data resides. Abacus Insights’ cloud-based platform connects and unlocks that data and allows patients to receive more proactive, personalized care at a lower cost.”
The Blue Venture Fund is a unique collaboration between BCBS companies, BCBSA and Sandbox to which thirty-six BCBS companies have committed over $800 million across four funds. The Blue Venture Fund invests in promising, emerging companies of strategic relevance to Blue Cross and/or Blue Shield Plans and provides the portfolio with access to BCBS companies -- representing 105 million members (one in three Americans) -- to deploy innovation at scale. Sandbox is an independent company that provides healthcare-related investment management exclusively for the Blue Venture Fund.
“This new funding validates our company’s mission, which is to help health plans liberate health data,” said Dr. Minal Patel, founder and CEO of Abacus Insights. “Doing so allows consumers to make better health choices and physicians to make more informed treatment decisions.”
“Abacus Insights is a mission-driven company at the intersection of cloud computing, data and the discipline of healthcare. We know that each and every data point in a person’s health record is meaningful. We, and our health plan clients, share the belief that better data -- means better care. This investment represents an important step in our goal to make healthcare deeply personal and local, creating an ‘n-of-1’ experience for all consumers.”
Helping Health Plans Become Engines of Healthcare Innovation
Legacy mainframe technology systems in place at many health plans have become a bottleneck. As a result, insurers, healthcare providers and patients are not benefitting from data in the way they should.
Abacus Insights’ data platform standardizes, curates and enriches valuable healthcare data that is currently sitting idle, moving it out of restrictive silos, and securely into the cloud. It then combines and further enriches that data with hundreds of third-party data sources. Abacus’s connected and standardized platform enables health plans to integrate and share data with doctors’ offices, hospitals, urgent care clinics, pharmacies, dialysis centers and labs along with numerous digital health applications. By establishing and maintaining secure connections to digital health applications, Abacus Insights enables health plans to become engines of healthcare innovation -- providing accurate, reliable data used in everything from diabetes care management to wearables and wellness apps.
Today’s announcement follows one of the most significant federal policy changes related to personal health data in the last 20 years, one with far reaching implications for health plans and all stakeholders across the nation’s healthcare system.
In early March, federal officials finalized two new rules that outlaw the practice of “information blocking” when patients request access to their medical data. While the government has mandated that health plans make a range of health information available to consumers — and in a form that’s easy to understand — most health plans, today, are not able to meet that requirement. What’s more, the security requirements around sharing sensitive data are likely to tighten, making it even harder over time.
Using the Abacus Insights platform, health plans are able to transition from sharing of incomplete, inaccurate and often redundant health data with members to sharing health information that is complete, reliable and actionable, in a secure way meeting the requirements laid out by the Federal government.
About Abacus Insights
Abacus Insights enables health plans to offer a seamless, personalized care experience for members by reconciling thousands of unique attributes about individual consumers and their health that legacy systems simply cannot. We allow health plans to fulfill a critical role in ensuring that when a member visits the doctor’s office, lab, pharmacy, specialist, hospital and even at home -- the care provider always knows who they are, creating an “n-of-1” experience for all. For more information, please visit www.abacusinsights.com, LinkedIn, or Twitter @abacusinsights.
