Klara Technologies, a startup maker of a secure healthcare messaging platform, has closed on $3 million in seed funding. Lerer Hippeau Ventures and Germany’s Project A Ventures led the round, with participation from Atlantic Labs and Groupe Arneault.
Lerer Hippeau Ventures was an early investor in digital health startups Doctor on Demand, Maxwell Health and Oscar Health. Groupe Arneault, of Paris, has invested in corporate messaging platform Slack, among others.
Behavioral Health, Interoperability and eConsent: Meeting the Demands of CMS Final Rule Compliance
In a webinar on April 16 at 1pm ET, Aneesh Chopra will moderate a discussion with executives from DocuSign, Velatura, and behavioral health providers on eConsent, health information exchange and compliance with the CMS Final Rule on interoperability.
New York City-based Klara offers Web and mobile apps for accessing the platform, but Co-founder and Managing Director Dr. Simon Lorenz said it would be simplistic to think of Klara as an app.
“We’re not simply a messaging app,” he said. “It’s really an organizational messaging tool.”
Klara, which started in early 2014 as a consumer-facing telemedicine company, now is positioning itself as a hub for managing all communications regarding individual patients.
“We see healthcare as a network,” Lorenz said. “We want to connect everyone that is involved in the care of a patient.” That includes primary care physicians, specialists, clinical and office staff, insurance companies, care coordinators and, of course, patients themselves.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Klara has integrated with health IT vendors, most notably Epic Systems, and is in the process of integrating with athenahealth. This allows any authorized user to read and share clinical notes, schedules and other patient-specific details through the platform.
“We really want to interconnect the providers and interconnect the patients,” Lorenz said. He said that Klara has 500,000 active patients and counts about 500 clinical teams as daily users. Mount Sinai Health System in New York is among the largest customer.
Future plans include integration with billing software and e-prescribing systems. The former, Lorenz said, might allow patients to pay bills through the Klara platform.
Already, it’s being used to automate referrals from primary care physicians to specialists and for insurance prior authorization. Lorenz said the company has signed up every specialty pharmacy in the Big Apple because it’s good for their business — and because pharmaceutical companies have been pushing specialty pharmacies to adopt apps like Klara’s.
“The better the prior authorization, the more likely prescriptions will be filled,” Lorenz said.
Photo: Klara
