Seattle, Washington-based BloomAPI has raised $2.4 million for its medical records processing software. Y Combinator, Slow Ventures, Founder’s Co-Op, Section 32, Liquid 2 Ventures, and Parker Conrad all contributed to the round.
HIPAA allows anyone to ask for and receive their medical records. But EHR systems aren’t always designed with an elegant way to get records out of the system, leading to a status quo where records are often printed out and then faxed, mailed, or hand-delivered to patients, as well as to insurance companies that might need them.
BloomAPI is aiming to tackle that problem by installing a free software at practices that allow them to release records securely, easily, and electronically. The company has 300 doctors in its network currently and helps transmit records for more than a million patients.
While the software is free to providers and sits on their existing systems, BloomAPI makes money by selling access to its API to insurers and other vendors. That product is called ChartPull.
Interoperability between health records has long been a goal in healthcare, one that still seems a long way off. What’s interesting about the BloomAPI approach is that, rather than tackling the huge problem of enabling seamless data sharing between EHRs, the company is just trying to make the current status quo — record requests — a little more high-tech. While electronically requesting and transmitting records might not be as good as real data exchange, it’s still quite a bit better than printing and faxing.
This is the first round of funding for the company, and it will go toward hiring engineering, operations, and sales staff in the Seattle area.
[“Source-healthcareitnews”]
