Our Investment In Medchart: Accessing Health Data for Business Beyond Care
Golden Ventures is excited to share our involvement with Medchart, a company that powers patient-authorized health information for businesses, researchers, and all patient services.
Medchart’s mission is to help bring accessibility, efficiency, and transparency to a multi-billion dollar industry that still relies on archaic systems and processes to facilitate data movement.
Today, the company announced its $17M Seed + Series A financing led by our friends at Crosslink Ventures and Vast Ventures. We led their seed round and are excited to continue our partnership with founders James Bateman and Derrick Chow.
Accessing Healthcare Records Is Challenging
James and Derrick have firsthand experience in how difficult and frustrating it can be to access healthcare record data. Their initial objective was to solve the problem on behalf of patients, liberating them from mailing and faxing requests and carrying binders full of printouts and CD-ROMs. In digging deeper, they were surprised to discover that this problem wasn’t something only patients experienced; businesses do as well.
They discovered several challenges related to healthcare information access and sharing:
- Information is siloed: Individual healthcare data sets are stored in many disconnected systems and locations, from paper copies in filing cabinets to PDFs on hard drives to proprietary EHRs.
- Records can be hard to find: There wasn’t an easy way to look up where patient data might reside, and asking a patient to list out every single medical facility they’ve visited was impractical and led to errors.
- Sharing methods are not comprehensive: The existing infrastructure solves for depth or breadth, but not both.
- There’s a lack of standardization: Fragmented health data sets are not normalized across different systems in either formatting or standards. As a result, generating data insights across multiple sources requires human expert opinion or review.
- The industry is stuck in the past: Huge service businesses specialize in manual record retrieval, transcription, insights, and transmission between businesses and patients.
- Sharing can be expensive: It’s cost-prohibitive to access and interpret comprehensive health data at scale. Each year, billions of dollars are spent on the systems, people, and time required to facilitate medical information requests and analysis.
It became clear that the entire industry lacked meaningful connectivity and the appropriate interoperability between patients, data custodians, and data requestors.
The fix? A cloud-based solution that abstracts away the pain associated with these requests and complies with patient preferences and global privacy standards.
Building for the Future
Medchart is developing an AI/ML-powered platform to streamline the medical record retrieval and transmission process for custodians, requesters, and patients. Its technology automates repetitive tasks such as compiling, de-duplicating, labeling, and categorizing data. The result is a structured data set that will eventually facilitate machine-to-machine transactions between various health systems and third parties with patient-authorized access to this data. This automation and efficiency dramatically speed up and cut the cost of getting health information for common business tasks — and unlocks new generations of digital transformation and analytics.
Our fund’s thesis is grounded in a belief that democratizing access to previously scarce resources enables innovation and efficiencies at a meaningful scale. In the same way that Twilio, Plaid, and Stripe simplified access by providing infrastructure for undifferentiated heavy lifting, we believe the same will need to be done in the healthcare space to power the next wave of innovation.
Since we invested at the seed, the Medchart team has amassed numerous customers across North America, including major logos in the legal, insurance, pharmacy/life sciences, and health networks verticals.
We believe there’s huge potential to unlock future innovation and value in sectors that could benefit from comprehensive health data sets.
Our team is proud to be a part of Medchart’s journey, and we hope that you’re excited by the potential as well. The company’s headquarters are in Toronto, Waterloo, and Dallas. This financing round will help them meet widespread demand in North America. They’re hiring for various exciting positions, and we would love for you to help contribute to their mission.
