MPIRICA Health, a digital health company boasting price and quality transparency tools, has closed a $4.6 million Series A round led by Israeli equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd and a Seattle-based private equity firm, according to an emailed press release. The Seattle-based digital health startup, designed to help users make informed decisions on where to have procedures done, will use the funds to support roll-outs of its platform to Medicare Advantage customers and self-insured employers and add staff.
“[We plan to] scale the cognitive technology platform so that more people and organizations can readily access the best healthcare outcome information for their specific surgical needs,” said Chris Diede, cofounder and Chief Marketing Officer of MPIRICA Health, in an email.
He added that the company would add employees across data science, product development, and business development “to power its next wave of growth through select distribution channels and partners.”
Asked how the company was different than other digital health businesses with transparency tools, Diede said it was not only focused on price transparency but also outcomes.
MPIRICA quality score platform
“Many doctor review portals are essentially creating a ranking system of a physician’s qualifications of schooling, bedside manner, etc. This is not a sufficient measure of outcomes — for example in the case of an avoidable mortality, the patient cannot leave a negative review of his doctor. A few sites do count up factors independently and report them out (like complications and readmissions) with little to no risk adjustment (which takes into account the conditions of the providers’ patients).”
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.
Independent of the MPIRICA Quality Score, he pointed out that the business has developed an efficiency metric, allowing payers to easily identify the highest-value providers of surgery.
MPIRICA’s commercial customers pay an annual subscription fee, including Medicare Advantage plans, commercial health plans, self-insured employer services, and primary care physicians. It also offers a subscription to end consumers — $49 for three months of access. In a bid to expand its customer base, the company signed a commercial agreement with Welvie, a surgery decision-support company, to provide outcomes-based surgical scores to Welvie’s customers in November last year. MPIRICA also licenses its Quality Scores tools through an API and cloud-based platform in the self-insured employer space to population health companies (such as Advanced Plan for Health), and large benefits consultants, Diede noted.
Eduardo Shoval, OurCrowd First General Partner, pointed out in an email that what separates MPIRICA from other digital health companies in this category is that it’s a quality transparency company with a scoring system that is based on clinical outcomes and not subjective reviews.
“What made MPIRICA stand out in our eyes as investors is the company’s conviction that outcomes are the single most important factor in surgery decision making…the methodologies behind the product have been designed, evolved, tested, peer-reviewed, and published over almost 30 years by medical doctors and statisticians,” Shoval said.
MPIRICA is one of 24 healthcare companies that OurCrowd has invested in since January last year. The crowdfunder has invested $30 million across those businesses to date.
Photo: Hong Li, Getty Images
