This article was co-authored by Rashmi Gopinath and Shwan Kazzaz.
US healthcare spending grew exponentially over the past several decades, outpacing the growth of the U.S. economy.: In 1970, 6.9% of the U.S. GDP was spent on healthcare and by 2019, it had that increased to 17.7% of GDP in 2019 and reached $3.8 trillion. Despite these massive expenditures, the healthcare industry still lacks access to the type of data needed to make clinical decisions, deliver high-quality and efficient care outcomes, and measure care quality across the entire continuum of stakeholders, including healthcare providers, payers and pharma. One way to enable access to key health data is interoperability — the ability to access, exchange, and integrate data across different information systems.
Interoperability enables a wide array of improvements in both care quality and cost, including streamlining the efficiency of healthcare delivery, facilitating value-based outcomes and payments, and improving drug discovery. Physicians depend on complete and reliable data to inform clinical interventions, determine how and when to engage with patients to keep them healthy, and identify which treatments are working. Additionally, interoperability is a key requirement to facilitate the shift to value-based reimbursement payer models. Last year, CMS Administrator Seema Verma gave an address at the HIMSS conference, where she said “Technology and the sharing of data underpin the entire move to innovative payment mechanisms in healthcare. Without effective, open data sharing, providers cannot keep patients healthy.” Unfortunately, interoperability has historically remained frustratingly out of reach.
This is why B Capital is thrilled to double down on our investment in Innovaccer, the industry’s first health cloud and vertically-integrated data infrastructure platform that helps providers, payers, and life sciences companies seamlessly collaborate to deliver better quality patient care at lower costs. Back in 2018, I had the opportunity to partner with Abhinav, Sandeep and Kanav when I was at Microsoft Ventures and led their Ser B round and then partnered with this team again through B Capital in the Ser C round last year. Having known the team since 2018, we have high conviction in their ability to truly catalyze innovation in software that delivers better health care, and improved outcomes at much lower costs.
Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform (DAP) connects and integrates with clinical, claims, labs, and several other healthcare data sources through a FHIR-enabled, unified data model. With over hundreds of pre-built vendor integrations and connectors, and over 800 analytical data enrichments, the platform can help customers instantly get access to a 360-degree patient view. Over the past five years, Innovaccer’s Data Activation Platform has unified more than 24M patient records and generated customer savings of more than $600M by streamlining data from health plans, primary care providers, pharmacies, payers, labs and hospitals, and providing actionable insights to make faster and more accurate care decisions.
By further advancing its core technology, Innovaccer will make 100 million unified patient records accessible to 500,000 care team members through its platform over the next few years. Armed with this complete, enriched, holistic view of the patient, Innovaccer is able to deliver deep, cross-platform analytical capabilities unavailable to those operating out of legacy, siloed data sources. Innovaccer has not only built a complete solution at the data unification and warehousing layer, but also used that data to power a set of mission-critical applications to help some of the largest health systems in the U.S. deliver better care outcomes. These applications include Care Management, Clinical Decision Support, Patient Engagement, Risk Adjustment, Population Health Management, and Telemedicine, among others. With the introduction of the Innovaccer Health Cloud, Innovaccer is adding a developer toolkit that will empower others to build on its platform, creating the conditions for the rapid development of new, inherently interoperable digital solutions that leverage the same, longitudinal patient record.
Innovaccer’s mission to build the healthcare platform of the future has received impressive accolades. The company was ranked #1 by KLAS in the Population Health Management category, above competing solutions from legacy incumbents such as Epic and Cerner. Innovaccer is also ranked the #1 customer-rated Data Activation Platform and Healthcare Data Integration System in the 2021 Black Book User Survey.
The reception to Innovaccer has been universally enthusiastic, with adoption by several of the largest health systems in the country, such as Banner Health and Mercy Health. With the CMS Interoperability and Patient Access Rule pushing payers towards better ways to store and share patient data — Innovaccer’s products have begun to find significant traction with the country’s largest payer systems.
Beyond this traction, we were struck by the resounding feedback from highly satisfied customers, who describe the Innovaccer platform as “mission critical” to delivering better care outcomes at lower costs. A New York-based hospital system with 250+ beds and 400+ physicians chose Innovaccer’s data interoperability platform and the Hospital Command Center module to build a real-time surgical workflow dashboard. As a result, they reduced wait time unpredictability, improved scheduling efficiency, and increased revenue, achieving an 11% reduction in acute in-patient length of stay resulting in over $3.5M in annual savings. In addition, patients also saw a 22% reduction in wait times and a 12% reduction in ED Emergency Department visits. Similarly, Banner Health, one of the country’s largest non-profit healthcare system uses Innovaccer to manage their its population health strategy for over a million patient lives. We have heard numerous such examples of demonstrated improvement in care delivery outcomes and optimized economics for healthcare stakeholders across Innovaccer’s customers.
As the industry shifts towards value-based care, and as data plays an increasingly central role in how and when care is delivered, Innovaccer is uniquely positioned to accelerate digital transformation across the entire healthcare continuum and power the future of health. We’re excited to partner with Innovaccer and look forward to working together to build a platform that becomes the central gateway for all healthcare data to create a patient-centered data model across the entire healthcare continuum that can truly enable better care and make the healthcare system more efficient.