Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Cancer data analytics team Flatiron Health acquires specialized EMR business Altos, raises $130M

Update below Oncology analytics company Flatiron Health is part of a healthcare industry trend to […]

Update below Oncology analytics company Flatiron Health is part of a healthcare industry trend to de-silo and aggregate cancer data to help physicians and patients make more informed decisions about treatment. It has completed a $130 million series B round led by Google Ventures — its largest medical software  investment to date, according to The Wall Street Journal.

Other participants in the Series B included First Round Capital and LabCorp.

Some of the funds from the Series B were used to amp up its business with the acquisition of oncology software business Altos Solutions. The company has an oncology electronic medical record system OncoEMR, used by 1,300 oncology clinicians, which also includes a patient portal called SeeYourChart. The plan is to integrate OncoEMR and OncologyCloud, the statement said.

Update In a phone interview with MedCity News, Flatiron Health co-founder Nat Tuner said Altos Solutions president Carla Balch said although the companies will have separate products but the will be connected so it will be easier to move back and forth between their tools. They will also collaborate. When asked about the challenges of negotiating the balance between the insights about promising cancer treatments their tools can provide with what patients’ insurance will cover, Turner and Balch distinguished their decisionmaking tools from the oncology software businesses that work with insurance companies.

“Our respective tools are based on helping doctors and patients manage patients’ care,” Turner said. “They are providing an infrastructure. We are very different than some of the other companies in this space trying to force doctors down a particular path.”

Flatiron Health developed a platform called OncologyCloud that helps cancer centers and physicians to pool together clinical, practice management and billing data. Its first application for providers is a web-based program that’s designed to integrate a cancer center’s disparate data systems and give real-time business and clinical intelligence with benchmarking. The plan is to enable providers to use de-identified data from other cancer centers on the platform. It’s also developing a tool for life science companies to use OncologyCloud to accelerate research by matching patients to available clinical trials and automating data collection, according to a company statement.

Flatiron was founded by Turner and Zachary Weinberg. Prior to Flatiron, they co-founded advertising technology company Invite Media until Google acquired it in 2010.

Ultimately, Flatiron plans to expand its data analytics platform beyond cancer to other diseases, according to the statement.

A wide variety of groups have sought to crunch big data in cancer treatment to deliver more effective treatment guidance, such as IBM’s Watson collaborations, eviti and its collaboration with Aetna, and Via. The American Society of Clinical Oncology is developing a clinical decision support tool called CancerLinQ.

[Photo Credit: Flickr]

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