Abhijit Gupta and Ram Sahasranam have plenty of experience in the health tech space, having sold their first startup, health app maker Praxify, to Athenahealth. Now the duo are focused on value-based care. Fold Health is their operating system for cutting down on the amount of admin work performed by value-based providers. Today, the startup announced it has raised $6 million from Iron Pillar and global angel investors. This brings Fold’s total funding to $12 million.
Ten thousand patients currently use Fold, which has offices in San Francisco and Pune. While working on Praxify and other health startups, Gupta and Sahasranam saw several things inhibiting the transition to value-based care, which ties provider reimbursement to patient outcome. Existing tech infrastructure did not support outcome-driven models, and it was becoming unsustainable for practices to continue adding point solutions to their tech systems. Staffing shortages and burnout among primary care physicians was also a concern.
Sahasranam says 79% of primary care physicians experience burnout, because they typically have 2,500 to 3,000 patient panels in their care, which means that they are only able to see their patients when sick. One problem Fold is solving for practices transitioning to value-based care is data tools, since value-based care relies on accurately tracking and leveraging patient data for care decisions. Its platform can replace or integrate with existing systems.
Without Fold, its founders say that many primary care providers have spent money on point solutions that don’t really click with one another or turned to building their own tech suites. An OS for primary care, Fold integrates with electronic health records and gives users modular tools to customize the OS.
Features include a workflow engine that automates much of the work required by value-based providers, including care gap closure, transitional care management, annual wellness visit completions, high-risk patient engagement and attribution growth and protection. The care team enablement suite gathers all patient data, task management, omni-channel communications and scheduling to coordinate care teams. The Patient-Enablement suite is a white-labeled patient web and app portal that allows them to keep in touch with their care teams.
One use case of how Fold has been used by providers includes one early adopter, a primary care clinic that had high burnout rates among staff because of their fragmented tech ecosystem. Sahasranam says that by switching to Fold’s unified platform, it reduced the amount of time spent on administrative tasks, allowing providers more time for patient care.
Fold Health will use its new funding to add to new features focusing on primary care consumers and reducing administrative inefficiencies.
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