Dive Brief:
- Google Ventures led an $8 million investment round for Boston start-up PatientPing, which alerts physicians when their patients are admitted to another hospital's emergency department (ED).
- In addition, the admitting facility receives care guidelines such as medication lists, allergies, special instructions, and the patient's care team contact information.
- The company currently operates in four states: Connecticut, Massachusetts, Michigan and Pennsylvania. The new funding will be used to expand the company's network nationwide, after which it will explore additional services.
Dive Insight:
There has been increased pressure to reduce hospital readmissions, with the switch to value-based care, but sometimes patients are not readmitted to the same facility. PatientPing lets physicians know when their patient turns up in the ED or an urgent care clinic via mobile or desktop software. When the patient is admitted, their care provider receives a ping and the admitting facility receives patient care guidelines.
PatientPing CEO Jay Desai said this coordination hasn't existed because it's not a high priority in fee-for-service systems. "The reason there is no network is partially because people didn't have that strong of a financial interest in caring about what goes on outside their clinic," he told MobiHealthNews. "Now that we're very clearly moving to a value-based system, I think there's a much bigger demand for this sort of basic infrastructure to keep providers coordinating with one another."
Google Ventures recently invested in another startup, Collective Health, an alternative health insurance option for employers. Google's Life Sciences division is working on several big health challenges, including aging, cancer, glucose monitoring, and preventative medicine, as previously reported in Healthcare Dive.