Memora Health announced Tuesday that the San Francisco-based digital health platform has raised $40 million in financing to scale its operations and meet growing demand.
Transformation Capital led the financing with participation from Andreessen Horowitz, Frist Cressey Ventures, Edward Elmhurst Health, AlleyCorp, among others. Todd Cozzens, managing Partner at Transformation Capital, will join Memora’s board, the company said.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
The new financing enables Memora to meet commercial demand and drive new partnerships with health systems and payers, and further improve the care delivery experience for patients and their health providers, said Manav Sevak, co-founder and CEO at Memora.
The company continues to grow rapidly and digitizes clinical workflows in partnership with a number of leading healthcare organizations, including the Mayo Clinic and Penn Medicine.
“At a time when the healthcare workforce is under so much strain, we must invest in tech-enabled solutions that augment, extend and ease our ability to deliver world class healthcare at scale,” said Dr. Justin Bekelman, director of the Penn Center for Cancer Care Innovation and professor of radiation oncology at University of Pennsylvania, in an email.
He noted that Penn Medicine is testing ways to help patients with cancer manage side effects and adhere to treatment. In one initiative with Memora, Penn has a conversational AI texting tool that acts as a virtual care team member. The patient- and clinician-friendly platform is available day and night, supporting patients through complex cancer treatment and alerting clinicians when symptoms advance, Bekelman explained.
Supporting patients after an in-person or virtual appointment is taxing since much of that is done manually and patients often end up taking a lot of the burden on themselves, Sevak said. When patients reach out through their portals, it’s usually health providers who are the first point of contact, he added.
“By helping to digitize, automate and track all of those steps for the care teams, we’ve actually been able to reduce care team burden and notifications by nearly 40% so clinicians are spending less time sifting through messages and more time practicing at the top of their license,” he said.
Other organizations also help patients stay connected, reduce the burden on health providers and bridge care gaps, using artificial intelligence and other sophisticated approaches, such as Ada Health and Docent Health.
Memora tries to distinguish itself with a cohesive, easy-to-access, fluid approach that makes the optimal way of caring for patients the easy way, according to the company.
For patients: “Changing the process from reactive to proactive by allowing them to receive real-time guidance and proactive education significantly impacts their healthcare outcome,” Sevak said.
Photo: Getty Images, pixelliebe
