Diameter Health, a company focused on health data optimization and interoperability, has raised $18 million in a Series B funding round. Managed care organization Centene Corp. led the new financing round.
Diameter Health cleans and enriches health data, Eric Rosow, CEO of the company, said in an email. The company’s technology automatically ingests raw health information — that is, poorly formed, unstructured or incorrectly coded data — from EHRs and other data systems which it then normalizes, enriches, reorganizes and summarizes. It also takes out duplicate data.
“The [normalized] data can be used for clinical care, quality reporting, population health, risk adjustment and many other use cases,” Rosow added.
The recently raised funds will be invested in product development. The company plans to expand its Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-enabled integration solution, called Fusion, to accept and ingest all health messages, standards and data sources. Diameter Health also plans to add new artificial intelligence and machine learning capabilities to the Fusion system.
Further, the company will use the new funding to expand its network of direct connections between EHR systems, health information exchanges and other healthcare data sources.
“We invested in Diameter Health because their ability to automatically integrate and normalize clinical data will play an important role as we look to accelerate innovation and digitization across our company,” said Mark Brooks, Centene’s executive vice president and chief information officer, in a press release.
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.
In addition to Centene, the latest funding round included participation from existing investors Optum Ventures, LRVHealth, Connecticut Innovations and Activate Venture Partners. After raising $9.6 million in a Series A-1 funding round in April 2019, Diameter Health’s total funding now stands at $30 million.
The investment comes as efforts to advance interoperability and curb information blocking accelerate in the U.S. Two rules that implement the interoperability and patient access provisions of the 21st Century Cures Act were released by the Department of Health and Human Services earlier this year, and they require providers, payers and EHR vendors to share data more widely than ever before, both amongst themselves and with patients.
Interoperability requires standardized data that can be seamlessly shared. With several companies, like Verinovum and Innovaccer, also focusing on health data optimization, competition in the market is fierce.
But, for Diameter Health, its biggest competitors are “the companies using general purpose software, spreadsheets and expensive labor to ‘do it themselves’ — creating error prone, one-off solutions which do not scale, to meet the demands for real-time decisioning,” Rosow said.
“Diameter Health is unique because [our] best-of-breed technology is purpose-built to optimize health data at scale,” he added.
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