Healthcare data analytics company Aver Informatics thinks the next generation of healthcare reimbursement lies in bundled payments, and now Drive Capital and GE Ventures have backed up that hypothesis too.
The investors led an $8.5 million Series A that will allow the startup to expand its engineering and sales teams and accelerate growth, execs said.
Aver’s corner of the high-demand data analytics space involves helping payers and providers look at a patient population’s bills and “transform and modernize” them into payment bundles that create standardized protocols for different episodes of care.
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“There’s a perverse incentive that the more services you do, the more money you make,” said Kurt Brenkus, founder and CEO. “We’re trying to realign all of these incentives around episodes that match reality of what doctors and patients are doing to radically simplify the way in which healthcare operates.”
The software helps create the financial engineering of what a bundle should look like, Brenkus said. In the case of a knee replacement, the entire episode of care might cost $20,000 for one patient and $80,000 for another. The goal is to identify if the order that certain tests and imaging procedures are done correlate with lower costs and better outcomes, for example, or if patients with certain comorbidities would benefit from different protocols.
Payers account for the largest slice of Aver’s 15 customers, Brenkus said, including the newest additions, integrated health system UPMC and managed care company Molina Healthcare. “Ultimately we think this will go downstream, and benefit plan designs will change and simplify the process,” he added.
Green Bay, Wisconsin-based Aver was founded by Brenkus, a former operations director at United Health Group, and developer Matt Frohliger, in 2010. Since then they’ve raised about $2.5 million in angel capital and were selected for StartUp Health and GE’s three-year entrepreneurship program.
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Despite the company’s ability to secure several customers early on, Brenkus said that transforming the fee-for-service paradigm – Aver’s ultimate goal – is a one-day-at-a-time process. “We’re transforming 1 trillion in spend,” he said, “and you can’t do that overnight.”
[Image credit: Aver Informatics]
