$7.2 Million in New Funding for HealthCrowd to Improve Patient – Physician Communication & Care Outcomes

HealthCrowd, the industry’s first healthcare communications platform-as-a-service (CPaaS), announced on July 25th it had completed a $7.2 million round of funding led by TVC Capital, with participation from prior investors Startup Capital Ventures and Healthy Ventures, as well as others.

How to make patient-healthcare organization communication better

HealthCrowd is the first end-to-end engagement platform for healthcare. It provides support for healthcare organizations interested in unifying, automating and optimizing multiple forms of communication in order to deliver individualized patient oriented care. HealthCrowd provides a solution combining healthcare expertise and ad analytics. Its main focus is to engage patients, ensuring improved quality, clinical and financial better care outcome.

HealthCrowd’s Unified Communications Platform employs different technologies and channels  – text, voice, email, and nanosites – working in concert to drive members to action.

The company’s successful platform analyzes patients’ responses to various types of messages in order to learn which one works best with each particular patient, thus helping to improve health behaviors. Hospitals administrators can also adjust the system based on previous engagement metrics so that automated messages can be most effective at reaching specific objectives and outcomes.

This recent investment maintains HealthCrowd’s ability to deliver purposeful healthcare communications that encourage healthy behaviors and generate desired clinical and financial outcomes for its customers. HealthCrowd solution has been deployed to 26 US states across national, regional and local healthcare organizations.

In a 2012 piece analyzing the role mobile web, social media, and data can play in the healthcare industry, analyst and writer Michelle Snyder noted that, “while not as sexy as “social,” many within the healthcare system are recognizing the power of text messaging to not only reach the greatest number of at-risk patients but also to change behavior”.

As Snyder pointed out at that time, that results from Voxiva and HealthCrowd already supported the idea that efficient communication has a positive impact on a variety of measures, from prenatal care to immunization rates.

Results from Voxiva, HealthCrowd, and others in this space are showing the ability to positively impact a variety of measures from immunization rates and prenatal care to medication compliance.

Personalized communication works and pays off in the healthcare space

Time has only proven that messaging platforms are improving productivity in the healthcare space.  And HealthCrowd has invested early in direct messaging platforms by forming partnerships with various actors in the industry.  “We decided to partner with TVC Capital to accelerate our ability to transform the state of healthcare communications in the country to be on par with other industries”, Neng Bing Doh says.

These communication models work because the patient/provider relationship is a profoundly personal one. Although messages were initially only possible through SMS, they can now also be sent via voice, email and mobile web with minimal involvement from a healthcare professional.

HealthCrowd’s clients, primarily healthcare organizations, use its services to communicate with their members and patients via all available channels. These now include the newest types of chat, text messaging, voice, email and mobile web, adapted to every user device.

On a different note, The company’s business model is very different from that of its competition. Instead of billing organizations for the communication itself, HealthCrowd’ monetization model includes customers paying a fee for the convenience of communicating instantly with their physicians.  

‘Healthcare is a big market, but its complexities and nuances can make it challenging for companies to succeed. Strong product-market fit is paramount, and HealthCrowd understands how to bring products to market in this complicated ecosystem. The company has done a tremendous job of assessing and satisfying immediate market needs while laying the foundation for exceeding future customer expectations. For example, their application of machine learning is ambitious but at the same time immediately useful. What truly amazed me was the unanimous degree of enthusiastic satisfaction amongst HealthCrowd’s customers,’ said Mykel Sprinkles, Partner at TVC Capital in a statement.

‘We are proud to have built a strong and sustainable business.[…] The growth capital will allow us to make investments across key areas that are necessary to maintain our technology and market leadership. We chose TVC because of their strong operational expertise and track record of helping SaaS companies be successful,’ Neng Bing Doh added.

About HealthCrowd

HealthCrowd helps healthcare organizations unify, automate and optimize multimodal communications to deliver risk-managed member-centric engagement, at scale. HealthCrowd’s success derives from technology, service excellence, pride of ownership, member/patient navigation and activation, gap closure (HEDIS, STARS), retention, redetermination and any communication requiring an action be taken. This has a profound impact: HealthCrowd improve the quality of care via instant member/patient healthcare communications while providing significant cost savings to the health organization offering the service to its staff and patients. Predictive analytics, data mining and natural language processing techniques create durable successful platform IQ and EQ to drive rapid, measurable results. The company is based in San Mateo, CA.

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