The product of a new type of innovation model, Tendo Systems has raised $50 million in a Series B funding round.
The round, led by existing investor Lux Capital with additional participation from General Catalyst, has brought the eight-month-old healthcare software company’s valuation to $550 million.
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Tendo Systems main goal is to digitize and customize the entire patient care journey, said Dan Goldsmith, co-founder of the company, in a phone interview. To develop their digital engagement platform, the company is employing a foundational customer model.
Typically, technology companies will build a small product and they’ll take it out to market and acquire customers, but Tendo is deliberately selecting and partnering with health systems to create a product that can make the patient journey more seamless, Goldsmith explained.
Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, an early investor in the company, is Tendo’s first foundational customer.
For Jefferson, partnering with Tendo was a chance to get in on the ground floor of a promising new company and influence the technology being created.
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“[Providers] have to…become partners in the consumerization of healthcare,” said Dr. Stephen Klasko, president of Thomas Jefferson University and CEO of Jefferson Health, in a phone interview. “These things have to happen as partnerships and not the way they did before where EMRs get developed and we react, or telehealth gets developed and we react…What if we really merged the Silicon Valley move-fast-and-break-things mentality with the mission-driven and traditional healthcare ecosystem.”
Tendo Systems, along with Jefferson, is creating a platform that aims to be the “OpenTable” of healthcare, Goldsmith said. It will allow patients to search for care, schedule appointments, provide medical history via a virtual waiting room and schedule follow-up visits.
The company plans to use the recently raised funds for research and development, Goldsmith said.
“We want access and streamlined care to be…at the press of a button,” he said. “It’s a problem today that at the click of a button, I can see my entire financial health but not my entire personal health.”
Moving toward this goal, both Tendo Systems and Jefferson Health see their strategic partnership as the dawn of a new, more collaborative era in health IT innovation.
For one, developing a product with access to the wide range of health facilities within the Jefferson system — from academic medical centers and primary care facilities to rehabilitation — will allow Tendo and the health system to co-develop a product that can work across various health settings, Klasko said.
The collaboration will also eventually provide an additional source of revenue for Jefferson.
“We’ve watched hospital revenue and insurance rates go down, and we’ve watched companies have billions and billions of dollars worth of valuations based on these [new technologies] which we [piloted],” Klasko said.
He believes that providers are eager to get in on the revenue stream, rather than just be on the outside looking in.
“For Jefferson, that whole innovation and strategic partnerships new math has become a really important part of our financial outlook,” he added.
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