Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Tech entrepreneur raises $7M to double size of healthcare predictive analytics business

A Boston-based health IT entrepreneur wants to help hospitals get a better understanding of how […]

A Boston-based health IT entrepreneur wants to help hospitals get a better understanding of how they can reduce readmissions and solve operation room backlogs among other other pain points in healthcare. PatientRoute Systems, led by CEO Rich Krueger, raised $7 million from two investment firms to support the expansion of its predictive analytics software platform and double the size of its 12-person business, ideally by the end of the year.

The funding comes from the company’s first institutional investors — Pierpoint Capital  and Black Granite Capital. Krueger initially bootstrapped the business, but later received funding from some angel investors, Krueger told MedCity News in a phone interview.

Krueger previously led DynamicOps, which VMware acquired in 2012, and worked as a vice president at VMware before starting Patient Route in 2013. He cautioned that while hospitals can’t solve all of their operational challenges with its platform, they can use its predictive tools to detect patterns and identify the source of some of their problems. They can also allocate or shift resources to better manage them.

One example Krueger uses is surgery schedules. Surgeons may have a tough time accessing the OR for urgent or emergent cases or a significant number of these cases are done after prime time hours. That could have a knock-on effect for elective surgeries. Krueger said its software can help hospitals reduce the length of stay for urgent patients and improve on-time starts, reduce turnover time, among other things.

Krueger said it could also help health systems and medical centers make better use of their satellite centers to reduce patient bottlenecks and so they can provide enough staff to support patients at different locations. But he stressed that the company uses its platform to support the hospital’s clinical policy that the institution dictates.

The target users tend to be analysts or heads of departments, Krueger said, since it’s a clinical tool.

He said the company currently has clients across six states. It generally focuses on hospitals and surgical centers with more than 400 patient beds and recently added an academic medical center to its client base. Among its customers are Greater Baltimore Medical Center and Boston Medical Center.

 

 

Shares0
Shares0