Virtual specialty care platform AmplifyMD, which aims to help hospitals do more with fewer doctors, scored $20 million dollars this Wednesday in a Series B financing round led by Forerunner Ventures.
Other participants in the funding round included Memorial Hermann Health System, F-Prime Capital, Greylock Partners and Tau Ventures. AmplifyMD, which is based in Silicon Valley, has now raised a total of $43 million. CEO Meena Mallipeddi described the company as a “multi-specialty physician group really focused on driving access to care in a scalable manner.”
The startup partners with hospitals and health systems, providing them with a virtual care platform as well as an integrated physician network across more than 15 specialties.
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There aren’t enough physicians to meet demand, and existing providers are unevenly distributed, Mallipeddi pointed out. Due to these shortages, hospitals face issues like transfers, delayed admissions, longer stays and readmissions.
AmplifyMD’s platform and network seek to help hospitals address this issue, and unlike legacy telehealth point solutions, the startup is aiming to be comprehensive, Mallipeddi said. The company supports emergency department, outpatient and home care, as well as synchronous and asynchronous virtual care.
Smaller hospitals or those lacking certain specialties can tap into AmplifyMD’s physician network for coverage. Large health systems can put their own providers on the platform and use AmplifyMD’s AI tools to boost providers’ capacity and improve efficiency, Mallipeddi explained.
“We’re really focused on three objectives: time to clinical decision, the quality of that decision and the user experience. That is what our tools and our features really focus on — like ambient, dictation, intelligent clinical summaries, automated note generation,” she stated.
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She added that the use of AmplifyMD’s platform can improve outcomes in time-sensitive areas like stroke care, with physicians available in seconds to review scans and start treatment.
The platform can also help hospitals earn more revenue through added services lines, as well as reduce patients’ length of stay by a half day to a full day, Mallipeddi said.
“A half day to a full day doesn’t sound like a lot, maybe to a layman, but from a hospital perspective, that’s thousands of dollars per patient straight to the bottom line,” she declared.
Houston-based Memorial Hermann Health System — which is both a customer and investor in AmplifyMD — relies on the platform to help fill access gaps in certain specialties, like infectious diseases, said Feby Abraham, the health system’s chief strategy and innovations officer.
He also noted that AmplifyMD’s platform integrated seamlessly with his health system’s Epic EHR, allowing providers to stay within their existing workflows.
Memorial Hermann chose to pursue a strategic investment relationship with AmplifyMD because the health system is committed to moving care beyond hospital walls, Abraham pointed out. This includes urgent care, ambulatory surgery centers, retail clinics and community health centers, as well as at-home care models like hospital-at-home, infusions, dialysis and hospice.
“It’s going to be multi-modal, and it’s a full stack coverage model that hospital systems or healthcare institutions in the future are going to create — and AmplifyMD is going to be a critical partner in making that happen,” he stated.
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