mPulse Mobile, a company that’s a spinoff of mobileStorm, has made its first close of in a Series A round led by HLM Venture Partners. The $10 million it raised will go towards improving patients engagement on its communication service by tweaking the analytics behind it.
In emailed responses to questions, a spokesperson said:
“We are expanding our depth of capabilities with our analytics offering with innovations such as sentiment scoring, natural language processing and predictive analytics to enable an even more tailored, targeted and relevant dialog between the patient and their provider or plan.”
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The company also said it would use the funding to hire an additional 30-50 people.
Among the applications of its platform are emergency room wait times, appointment reminders, and patient satisfaction surveys.
The company’s interest in improving how healthcare groups communicate with patients speaks to a broader effort by startups and growth-stage companies that want to provide payers, pharmacies, physicians with more ways to reach patients to improve medication adherence and to reduce readmissions, a noticeable trend at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference this week.
OCA Ventures, Merrick Ventures and Jumpstart Ventures also invested.
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Merrick Ventures has also backed higi, a company that provides kiosks that help consumers to track their body stats such as body weight, pulse, and blood pressure and track changes over time. The kiosks are available at retailers such as Rite Aid, Giant, ShopRite, HEB and Publix.
Asked which areas they are seeing growth, the spokesperson said:
“We continue to see growth and new customers in our core plans and providers verticals and recently a surge in interest in pharma with our medication adherence solution (including education and adverse event monitoring)
Chris Nicholson, mPulse Mobile CEO said in a statement: “This additional investment will enable us to further enhance our analytics and behavioral models as we create best practices across millions of mobile touchpoints to help our clients support a two-way dialog.”
Last year, the company raised $1.8 million and added staff from Archer USA’s healthcare division. The company, which had a presence in Seattle and Jonannesburg, South Africa, produced patient engagement products for mobile devices. The personnel have mobile healthcare expertise along with customer and partner contracts.
