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.
Healthcare finance technology company Cedar announced Tuesday that it gained $200 million in a Series D financing round.
This new funding has raised the New York City-based company’s valuation to $3.2 billion and brought its total funding to $350 million. The financing round was led by Tiger Global Management and included existing investors Andreessen Horowitz, Thrive Capital and Concord Health Partners.
“We raised this significant Series D so that we can continue investing heavily in innovative technology to build out our full product roadmap, beyond our core financial engagement product — making the healthcare experience more personalized, transparent and convenient,” said Florian Otto, co-founder and CEO of Cedar, in an email.
The company’s flagship product uses EHR, demographic and behavioral data to personalize the patient’s financial journey. Established in 2016, the company currently engages with more than 300,000 patients a day.
Cedar will use the new funds to expand patient touchpoints and build out more patient engagement use cases, including pre-visit functionalities and tools focused on price transparency.
“Cedar has emerged as the market-leading, technology-enabled platform helping patients resolve their medical bills in ways that are easier and more relevant, resulting in improved financials for healthcare providers,” said Scott Shleifer, partner at Tiger Global Management, in a news release.
The healthcare financial experience is a common, and endlessly frustrating, patient pain point — and patients are willing to change providers based on that experience. Nearly 50% of the 3,000 healthcare consumers surveyed by RevSpring in 2019 said that a bad billing experience had inspired them to “shop around” for a new provider.
A large crop of healthcare fintech companies has sprung up with the aim of improving the patient financial experience, which means companies like Cedar face fierce market competition.
But Otto believes Cedar sets itself apart from its competitors by focusing on personalization and creating new metrics to better measure patient satisfaction.
“Cedar knows that patients are more than a propensity-to-pay score or user persona, which is why we combine technology and human creativity to personalize the patient experience across the entire healthcare journey,” Otto said.
Rather than focus on metrics like cash collections, Cedar has created new ones, such as resolution rate, which measures the share of invoices fully resolved as opposed to dollars collected, and is evaluated alongside patient satisfaction score, Otto said.
“Our mission has always been to enable exceptional patient experiences and transform healthcare, which is becoming more and more relevant in today’s market,” he said.
Picture: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images
