Electronic health records (EHR) have long been promising as a means of unlocking new superpowers for care and patients in the medical industry, but even though they have been doing so for a long time, access to and use of them is not so quick to become a reality. This is where Medchart comes in, which provides access to health information between companies, along with informed patient consent, for extensive use of the said data. The launch has just raised a $ 17 million Series A round, led by Crosslink Capital and Golden Ventures, and included funding from Stanford Law School, rapper NASA and others.
Medchart originally began as a multi-health game DTC game, providing access and transmission of digital health information directly to patients. It arose from the personal experience of co-founders James Bateman and Derrick Chow, who faced personal challenges in accessing and transmitting data from health records for relatives and loved ones in key moments of the health crisis. Bateman, CEO of Medchart, explained that their early experience revealed that what was actually needed to adapt the model and operate more effectively was a B2B approach, with informed patient consent as a key component.
“We are really focused on that component of patient consent and authorization that allows you to allow your data to be used and shared for a variety of purposes,” Bateman said in an interview. “And then build a platform that allows you to take that data, and then use it for those companies and services that we classify as ‘out of concern.’ Whether these are our core areas, which would be with you, your lawyer, insurance provider or clinical researcher – or beyond, looking to the future vision that this is truly a platform to innovate and all kinds of different applications and services for which you might imagine are usually outside the realm of direct care and treatment. “
Bateman explained that one of the main challenges in enabling patient health data to really work for these surrounding businesses, but not necessarily a key part of the care paradigm, is to provide data in a way that is actually beneficial to the recipient. Traditionally, this has required a lot of painstaking manual work, such as parallels passing over paper documents to find information that is not necessarily consistently formatted or located.
“One of the things we were really focused on was understanding those business processes,” Bateman said. “In this way, when we work with these companies that use this data – and the patient allows them to do all that – we deliver what we call” information “, and not just data. So what are the business decision points you are trying to make with this data? “
To achieve this, Medchart uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to create a deeper understanding of the data set so that it can intelligently answer specific questions that information data requires. This is their long-term value, because once that understanding is established, they can search for data much more easily to answer different questions, depending on different business needs, without the need to re-analyze the data each time.
“Where we build these intelligence systems on top of aggregate data, they are fully transferable to policy decisions for, for example, life insurance, or to pharmaceutical companies on real evidence for their third, fourth clinical trial phase and help these teams you understand, you know, the overall indicators and the existing conditions and what the outcomes are for the drugs in development or whatever measures they measure in their study, “Bateman said.”
According to Ameet Shah, a partner in the joint investor for the A Golden Ventures series, this is a key ingredient of what Medchart offers that makes the company’s offering so attractive in terms of long-term potential.
“What you want is both depth and width, and you need predictability – you need to know that you’re actually getting it as complete data,” Shah said in an interview. “There are all these significant solutions, depending on the type of clinic you are looking for and the type of record you are accessing, and that is not useful for the applicant. You’re putting a burden on them right now, and when we looked at it, we were like, “Oh, this is just a whole bunch of undifferentiated heavy lifting that the whole health ecosystem is trying to get rid of. What if [Medchart] you can commoditize it and reduce costs as low as possible, you can unlock all these new use cases that could never have been done before. “
One recent development that Medchart sets out to enable even new cases of patient data use is the 21st Century Medicines Act, which just came into force on April 5, giving patients immediate access to all health information in their electronic medical records. This opens up a huge potential opportunity in terms of patient data portability, with informed consent, and Bateman suggests that this will greatly accelerate innovation based on the type of information access provided by Medchart.
“I think there will simply be an absolute explosion in this area in the next two to three years,” Bateman said. “And in Medchart, we have already built all the infrastructure that has to do with these big information systems. We are already connected and providing data and value to end users and customers and I think you will now see this acceleration, adoption and growth in this area for which we are super positioned able to continue. “