Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Discharge decision support startup feted by Janssen raises $1.75M in series A

A health IT company that won a Janssen Innovation Challenge to devise ways to reduce […]

A health IT company that won a Janssen Innovation Challenge to devise ways to reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions has raised $1.75 million in a series A round.

RightCare Solutions‘ Discharge Decision Support System, or D2S2, uses a scoring system to identify patients who should be referred for post-acute services to avoid preventable readmission. Questions are administered by nurses and discharge planners and patients are referred for post-acute care support if their responses trigger an alert.

Compass Partners in New York and Domain Associates in Princeton, New Jersey led the financing round.

The Fort Washington, Pennsylvania company was co-founded by CEO Eric Heil and Kathy Bowles, a professor with the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing. Bowles received $5 million in funding from the National Institutes of Health to help develop the program.

Heil said in a statement the funding would help the company expand its team and expand its product to other hospitals around the country.

The system is the product of 10 years of research at the University of Pennsylvania School of Nursing led by Bowles. The platform is also designed to improve workflow and post-acute care transitions.

RightCare won Janssen’s Connected Care Challenge earlier this year. It used the $100,000 prize to support the build-out of its platform and run a pilot at four hospitals. It’s also developing a second-generation tool in the platform to identify where to refer patients at high risk of 30-day readmissions, such as home care, skilled nursing facility, rehabilitation, or nursing home. It was also a finalist in the Independence Blue Cross IBX Game Changers’ Challenge  over the summer.

Finding ways to reduce unnecessary hospital readmissions is a huge problem hospitals are trying to solve. This month marked the start of reduced Medicare reimbursement for hospitals with higher rates of readmission for certain conditions than the national average as a provision of the Affordable Care Act.

 

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