Canvas Medical, a startup looking to build a new health record system for primary care practices, raised $17 million in funding. The San Francisco-based startup makes software for charting, population health management and billing, intended to replace practices’ current electronic health record systems (EHR).
Inspired Capital and IA Ventures led the funding round, with participation from Irongrey and past investors Upfront and iSeed. The company plans to use the funds to build a less fragmented version of health record systems for primary care doctors, especially when it comes to implementing features for value-based care.
“Physicians in every corner of the country have told us they need better technology to succeed in new payment arrangements with their insurance partners. Not just faster software that’s easier to use, but smarter software,” Canvas Founder and CEO Andrew Hines said in a news release. “Leading insurers know their longitudinal data is key to building smarter clinical systems, and they know a reimagined EHR is the ideal context for those insights to empower clinical teams day in and day out.”
Initially built as a billing tool, EHRs have added an amalgamation of features to keep up with value-based payment models, telehealth, and other shifts in care.
“An overhaul of the electronic health record is overdue,” John Glaser, former CEO of Siemens Health Services and a former senior vice president at Cerner wrote in Harvard Business Review last year He added that an overhaul must support providers’ ability to shift to value-based care.
Hines founded Canvas in 2015. The idea was to make charting and other administrative tasks less time consuming. For example, the company claims its software can reduce the number of clicks by 80%, by auto-completing some fields in the medical record and dropping in billing codes automatically as physicians chart.
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.
The startup also works with insurance companies to get a bigger picture of what happens to patients at other points in their care. To start, it struck a value-based partnership with Anthem, which involves delivering machine learning insights from Anthem into physicians’ workflows.
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