Boston-based Iora Health, a company that aims to reinvent primary care through its own primary care practices, raised $126 million in a Series F funding round.
The investment was led by India-based Premji Invest, the investment group of Wipro Ltd chairman Azim Premji, and existing investors Cox Enterprises, Temasek Holdings, F-Prime Capital, Devonshire Investors, .406 Ventures, Flare Capital Partners, Polaris Partners, and Khosla Ventures participated.
The ten-year-old company's previous backers include GE Ventures and Rice Management Company. It has raised a total of $381.5 million in venture funding to date.
Iora Health's model is to open up primary care centers for the Medicare population. Typically, these centers are based in a retail environment, often next to a drug store or supermarket. The company establishes care teams consisting of up to three primary care physicians, nurse practitioners, health and behavioral coaches.
Iora Health claims its patients averaged over four visits in 2019 across its 48 practices with twice as many electronic interactions with their care teams.
According to Kathleen Haley, vice president of marketing and communications, capital infusion from this round will be directed towards three main focus areas: directed towards three main focus areas: To bolster its proprietary care platform, Chirp, to be certified as a Medicare Certified Electronic Health Records system (this will make the platform capable of generating standardized patient information to be shared with specialists outside of the company’s network through an encrypted messaging protocol), to “optimize and refine its care model,” by serving more patients in its network, and to expand its network by adding more practices in its current markets. The company opened practices in Texas, North Carolina and Georgia last year.
"I founded Iora Health with the clear intent of not only building a successful company that transforms lives through our high impact, relationship-based care but also to transform the entire healthcare industry," Rushika Fernandopulle, MD, MPP, CEO and co-founder of Iora Health said in a statement. "We are doing this today through incredibly talented and empathetic teams, proprietary technology that is designed to support our care model and thoughtful relationships with our patients and plan partners to be able to deliver this care."
Haley said that although the majority of the openings are for care teams, the company is also hiring significantly in sales and marketing, technology and human resources across its markets.
