Successful healthcare providers must continuously improve their care models to keep up with changing patient demands and advances in technology. To accomplish this, many care delivery companies have brought software developers in-house to help strengthen their unique care models. That’s where Canvas Medical comes in, according to Andrew Hines, the EMR startup’s founder and CEO. He founded the company in 2015 as an extensible EMR and practice management system to foster more effective clinician-developer collaboration.
On Thursday, Canvas raised $24 million in a Series B funding round. It was led by M13 with participation from Haystack and previous investors Inspired Capital, IA Ventures, Upfront Ventures and Irongrey. The round brings the San Francisco-based company’s total funds raised to $44 million.
Transforming Patient Care: The Role of AI-Powered Assistants
The progress in artificial intelligence (AI) is reshaping patient care, across various dimensions, from facilitating faster discharge to curating treatment plans and suggesting lifestyle changes.
The startup sells its software to care delivery companies, from specialty telehealth startups to in-home senior care enterprises. After five years of development, Canvas released its suite of developer tools last fall to help these companies manage their data and launch new patient experiences, such as financial engagement or self-scheduling tools.
Hines declined to share how many customers Canvas currently has, but he said the company’s customer base has grown by 300% since launching the software suite. Customers include Patina Health, Circulo, Vivante Health and Isaac Health. He said the customer feedback he receives confirms that Canvas’ platform helps them avoid building from scratch or conducting complex retrofits of legacy systems.
“The shared goal is to dramatically accelerate the design, operationalization and continuous improvement of care models for better patient health outcomes,” Hines said. “So in a sense, Canvas is designed to solve the care modeling problem and do so in a way that is one and the same with the system of record.”
The company will use the funds it raised to develop more software capabilities and bring them to market, including new security and governance features.
Market Trends to Watch for Health Systems and Their Specialty Pharmacies
The future looks bright for the integrated specialty pharmacy model – for health systems, providers, and most importantly, for patients.
In addition to the funding, the startup also announced that it has become the first EMR company founded in the past two decades to be federally certified by the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC). Canvas earned this certification because its software is built on a standardized patient data API that complies with the ONC’s upcoming API enforcement by the 21st Century Cures Act. This milestone is an important one for the startup because providers must use ONC-certified EMR systems in order to receive incentive payments from Medicare and Medicaid.
“We built our standardized Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources API for patient data entirely in-house and are committed to going even further, increasing our support for all United States Core Data for Interoperability resources,” Hines added.
With the ONC certification, Canvas customers are now eligible for value-based payment models in Medicare and Medicaid programs. Hines said the company will work with its customers to understand these models and develop an implementation plan at the right speed and scope for them.
This makes the startup more attractive to care delivery companies looking to explore these risk-sharing models. Canvas’ most important criteria for its customers is their commitment to care model innovation and technology’s role in that, Hines said. He admitted that his company is not a good fit for “traditional office-based practices looking to maximize profit on the fee-for-service treadmill.”
Hines said any ambulatory EMR or EMR-adjacent software product, such as a scheduling tool or an order entry tool, could be considered a Canvas competitor. But, he added, customers stick with Canvas due to its dual dedication to developer tooling and care team experience. While many other companies sell API-only developer solutions or canned workflows, Canvas is seeking to “weave developer capabilities into a complete workflow system for the best of all worlds.”
Photo: MartinPrescott, Getty Images