Elation Health, an EHR provider for independent primary care practices, raised $40 million in a Series C financing round. It plans to use the new funds to expand its core technology platform and add new capabilities to support business operations.
Elation Health’s platform includes health records and integrated tools for virtual care, patient engagement and practice operations, Dr. Kyna Fong, co-founder and CEO of the company, said in an email. Earlier this year, the company added telehealth and self-scheduling to its core offering.
With the new funds, the company plans to add operations-focused solutions, including billing and payment collection and quality reporting capabilities. Generation Investment Management led the new funding round with participation from existing investors, including Threshold Ventures and Kapor Capital.
The healthcare industry has had a challenging year, to say the least, working to curb a rapidly growing pandemic while seeing revenues shrink. Primary care practices have been hit especially hard, with one Health Affairs study estimating that over the course of 2020, primary care practices will lose $67,774 in gross revenue per full-time-equivalent physician.
But despite sobering predictions, Fong believes the future is bright for primary care.
“We see a lot of positive growth and innovation in primary care, even in this challenging year,” she said. “From the classic ‘mom-and-pop’ local practices, to refreshing new direct primary care models and larger primary care innovators like Crossover Health and Cityblock. The pandemic has only heightened awareness that we need to invest in sustainability of primary care as the backbone of our healthcare system.”
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.
Elation Health was born after Fong and her brother helped their father transition his solo primary care practice from paper charts to a digital system. Today, about 14,000 clinicians use Elation Health’s platform, and in 2020, the platform delivered more than 20 million in-office and virtual visits. The company has raised $63 million in total since it was founded a decade ago.
Though there are several companies providing EHRs and other technology to primary care and solo practices — athenahealth, AllegianceMD and AdvancedMD to name a few — Fong believes that Elation Health goes a bit farther.
“There’s some great health technology companies on the market today in this space, but they’re all really designed for billing first and foremost. That fee-for-service, administrative focus runs very deep in their DNA,” she said. “Elation is unique in that we invested heavily on the clinical experience from the beginning. This has uniquely positioned us to support primary care practices in providing high-quality care and managing the complex transition to value-based payment models.”
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