TimeDoc: A Digital Health Success Story

I first met Will Boeglin, the CEO of TimeDoc Health, in the Spring of 2018. Shortly thereafter, Grand Ventures went on to lead its Seed round. As we celebrate their $48.5M Series B this week, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on the Journey, the Bright Future Ahead, and why we’re so excited about Digital Health.

The Journey

I first met TimeDoc in early 2018 after it had received accolades in the University of Chicago Booth School of Business New Venture Challenge. TimeDoc was an early leader in the nascent field of Chronic Care Management (CCM). CCM is a monthly telehealth service provided by nurses to help high-risk patients manage their chronic diseases and navigate the healthcare system. The genesis of CCM (in layman’s terms) is that data proved that early/preventative care of patients improved patient outcomes and also reduced medical expenses by treating patients before they’re hospitalized or need a trip to the ER. Supported by the data, Medicare had created new billing codes to offer and reimburse CCM services to the patient population.

The lightbulb moment for TimeDoc came in a very real setting. One of its founders, Dr. Curt Grinder, at the time a MD MBA candidate at University of Chicago, had been asked to research CCM as part of one of his rotations and found many challenges with providing CCM to patients. First, care providers were already incredibly busy, in many cases, they didn’t have enough nurses to provide CCM. In addition, in order to get reimbursed, the protocols, care provided, and time spent had to be very carefully documented and recorded- both in the billing system and in the electronic medical records.

As a VC, I observed a few factors that got me excited about this as a prospective investment.

• CCM was a new sector created by regulatory change.
• Current processes were highly manual and confusing, ripe for technology to automate.
• Updates were desperately needed by the patient population to make a measurable impact on both outcomes and cost.

Sounded like a problem for technology to solve! But as Dr. Grinder researched solutions, he was unable to find good technology.

Dr. Grinder (Chief Medical Officer) quickly reached out to close friends Will Boeglin (CEO) and John-Patrick Di Cosola (CTO) with the idea for a new business and TimeDoc was born. They would build the first modern software solution to help automate all of the manual processes, and they also decided to build out a small, but scalable, team of care providers who could help facilitate care for providers who lacked resources. They were one of the first providers to offer a true hybrid solution: tech-only “DIY” or a combination of “outsourced” services.

The addressable market: 58M Medicare patients in 2015 growing to 80M by 2030. In less than 16 months, and less than 2 years since inception, TimeDoc had grown to: over 60 clients, 180 physicians, 130,000 clinical encounters documented, 1.4M minutes of patient care logged in TimeDoc, and $2M in reimbursements generated for clients.

As a venture fund, we believed this had a lot of the right ingredients for success.

• A massive, nascent, and underserved market created by a breakthrough in healthcare and regulatory change.
• Strong, technical founding team — specifically a medical practitioner and subject matter expert.
• Fast and capital efficient growth.

The Bright Future Ahead

Grand Ventures led TimeDoc’s Seed round in 2018 and with less than $2.5M of Seed capital, in the ensuing 18 months TimeDoc managed to grow all KPIs by 1000%. This led to its $5M Series A in early 2020 led by Vocap Investment Partners, which led to continued growth in the team, revenue, and most importantly, the scale and impact on patient health.

Today, TimeDoc Health staffs and delivers virtual care management solutions for providers and has proven its model with hundreds of healthcare organizations, helping to improve clinical and financial outcomes. During the pandemic, the company was instrumental in helping providers increase their bandwidth and overall quality of care for more than 70,000 patients — while also delivering significant revenue for reimbursable remote patient monitoring and chronic care management services.

The $48.5M Series B, led by Aldrich Capital Partners, will allow TimeDoc to grow its workforce and to expand its technology to better serve the providers and patients we serve. I’ve never been so excited for what lays ahead, confident in our team, and inspired by the impact we can have on lives.

Congrats Will, Curt, and John-Patrick on this important milestone! It has been my honor and joy to support you on your journey. Let’s goooooo!

Why We Love Digital Health

Data. As famously stated by Marc Andreeson in 2011 “Software is Eating the World”. Technology is now everywhere and along with its growth, we’ve seen astronomical rise in the amount of data being created.

AI. Thanks to more recent advances in AI, that data can now be accessed, analyzed, and understood at a scale that was not possible just years ago. Not long ago, we would have probably compared technology’s growth to the famous “Moore’s Law” predicting the speed of computing on a chip to double every two years, which demonstrates an exponential growth curve. More recently replaced by “Neven’s Law”, Hartmut Neven, the director of Google’s Quantum Artificial Intelligence Lab, states that the growth in power with each new improvement to Google’s best quantum processor is growing at not just an exponential rate, like in Moore’s Law, but at a doubly-exponential rate.

Healthcare? But…healthcare has historically been different. People are not chips and hospitals look nothing like Apple Music, Amazon, or Ebay. In his 2012 classic book, Abundance, the Future is Better than You Think (Exponential Technology Series), Peter Diamandis predicted that future innovations in technology would allow healthcare for the first time in history, to begin innovating along an exponential growth curve. Drumroll…and he was right.

Data + AI + Healthcare = A better future for all of us.

As digital health continues to grow at an exponential rate, the potential impact is unlimited. Continued innovations at the intersection between technology and healthcare will redefine the way researchers understand health, pioneer new treatments, deliver care, and improve wellness.

Grand Ventures is proud to have supported TimeDoc Health and excited to increase our focus on digital health as an industry and the founders leading it forward! (If you’re a seed-stage digital health company, we would love to hear from you!)