BioIQ raised $26.5 million as part of an effort to ramp up growth for its population health technology business, according to a news release. In a phone interview, CEO Justin Bellante said the company is preparing to announce an acquisition next month and is positioned to look for other technology companies to grow and finetune its business.
The company supports employers and health plans and does risk assessments and drills down to identify care gaps, such as individuals who need a vaccine, for example.
“One of the challenges we fundamentally help us helping people move through the system or bringing the health system to the people — that’s how we address the access challenge in healthcare.”
New investors HealthQuest led the funding, with Arboretum Ventures joining the syndicate alongside angel and quasi-institutional investors.
BioIQ has evolved from its start in 2005 when it had a direct-to-consumer business model and positioned itself as the Netflix of home testing kits. Users could go online and order testing kits for conditions such as colon cancer and diabetes and send them to a lab partner to perform the test. But it discovered little appetite at that time for consumers to pay out of pocket for this service. That’s when it pivoted to corporate wellness, Bellante said of the Atlanta-based business.
“Consumers and employees have a lot of different preferences for the way in which they prefer to be engaged,” Bellante said. “We would help them navigate a pathway and manage risk so they could go to a doctor, access a nurse in a retail clinic or connect to a digital network” through partners such as Castlight Health.
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.
He noted that the evolution of the healthcare landscape has meant that the company sees a lot of “cross-pollination between what health plans are doing in value-based care and what employers are trying to do.
Bellante is excited by the prospect of Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway and JPMorgan Chase getting into healthcare because they see a system that isn’t doing a good enough job to improve access and the pace of change is not happening fast enough for them.
Photo: D3Damon, Getty Images
