Top Story, Daily

Clockwise.MD raises $1M to expand wait time platform to labs, primary care practices

Lightshed Health, which developed wait time platform ClockwiseMD, has raised $1 million from Martin Ventures to add staff and expand its wait time platform beyond urgent care to labs and primary care practices.


Part of the consumerization of healthcare involves helping people quantify the wait time for appointments. Clockwise.MD’s app is squarely in that space. Founder and CEO Michael Burke told MedCity News about the $1 million in funding it received from Martin Ventures to add staff and expand its app beyond the urgent care space.

Burke has always been interested in technology. Although he got his start in healthcare working at CR Bard, he founded healthcare IT startup Dialog Medical in 2001. It automated the patient informed consent process. Ten years later, Standard Register acquired the business, which by then had $5 million in annual revenue.

He used the money from that deal to start Lightshed Health in 2012, which produced Clockwise.MD. It has grown to serve more than 900 urgent care and convenient care facilities, with much of that growth in the past year. Despite bootstrapping his previous company, Burke wanted to secure venture backing so he could build out the sales and marketing team to adequately serve the needs of customers.

Burke said the Atlanta-based company plans to add at least six to eight staff in the short term. Half of the staff it is hiring will be in sales and marketing and the other half will be developers.

“Rapid growth has strained our operations so I needed to make hires to continue to deliver the level of service our customers expect.”

Some of the funding has been allocated to product development. Its health system customers want Burke and his team to expand ClockwiseMD to calculate wait times in other areas, such as labs, imaging and primary care practices.

Its technology involves capturing time stamps that get fed into its algorithm. Customers get an embedded widget for the website that lets patients select a time slot. It also sends automated texts to inform patients when wait times increase for any reason. There is a self check in and a feature that lists wait times and the order of patients. A dashboard flags up at-risk patients.

Burke makes a clear distinction between what it is doing with urgent care and health systems with online waiting lists for emergency rooms. He maintained that the advance notification of some ER wait list technology can make it tough to calculate how a hospital will triage walk-ins. If they take them right away, that additional time doesn’t necessarily get included.

Martin Ventures is well-known for its healthcare investments. Charlie Martin, its founder, started Vanguard Health and later sold it to Tenet for $4.3 billion. Its investment in ClockwiseMD brings its healthcare portfolio companies to 17, according to its website.

Photo: Flickr user Francisco Orsolo

Shares0
Shares0