Persistent Systems, an enterprise software builder with more than 9,000 employees and offices in the U.S., Asia, Canada, Europe and South Africa, acquired Herald Health, a local digital health startup that seeks to help doctors manage electronic medical records more effectively.
Terms of the deal, which closed on Aug. 24, were not disclosed.
Herald Health was a part of last year's first digital health cohort of PULSE@MassChallenge, the six-month Boston accelerator that partners startups with various entities working in healthcare. Together with 30 fellow startups, the company was in the program from January to June 2017.
Bradford Diephuis, co-founder and CEO of Herald Health, said that they first got in touch with Persistent Systems in April. Both the companies were working independently at Brigham and Women's Hospital, where Herald Health launched in 2015.
Herald Health was launched from a pitch at Brigham’s Digital Health Hackathon, when Diephuis was a medical student at Harvard Medical School. At that time, the problem they were trying to solve was improving the electronic medical record system so doctors could access new information - like patients' test results - more quickly.
"The EMR is really good at storing all of the data that is relevant for a patient, but it's not particularly optimized for presenting or notifying providers about that information," Diephuis said.
Enter Herald Health. The platform monitors the data that is being inserted into the EMR at any given moment and pushes data out to providers in order to help them take action more quickly. For example, a physician could opt for being notified every time a patient's value, say, drops by a certain amount.
After proposing the system at the hackathon, the company incorporated in December 2015. In 2016, it launched a pilot at Brigham with 120 doctors using the platform for nine months, until June 2017.
From that pilot, they realized that the system they were working on could help other people in the hospital, including care coordinators (who may want to know when a patient with a certain insurance comes into the emergency room) and operation managers (who need to know when a bed becomes available).
"What we actually had was a generalizable platform for managing real-time data in the hospital system," Diephuis said.
Currently, the Herald Health system is used at Brigham and Women's Hospital, its affiliate Brigham and Women's Faulkner Hospital in Jamaica Plain and at Boston Children's Hospital.
Diephuis didn't disclose how many employees work at Herald Health, but said that they realized that strategic acquisitions could allow them to deploy their product more easily and directly than building an in-house sales team. Around six months ago, the company was still actively fundraising.
Following the acquisitions, the office of Herald Health will be absorbed into one of Persistent Systems's current locations. Persistent Systems has already made significant investments in health IT through other Boston area partners like Partners Healthcare.
