A Madison-area startup founded by a former employee of Epic Systems Corp. has raised $700,000 from Wisconsin investors that include Kevin Conroy, the CEO of Exact Sciences Corp. (NYSE: EXAS).
Nurse Disrupted Inc. is based in Fitchburg and was founded in 2020 by Bre Loughlin, a registered nurse and former nursing innovation and project lead at Epic. Nurse Disrupted provides telehealth solutions designed to help provide remote care at homeless shelters, rural health clinics and community organizations that don't have on-site health staff.
The company's seed funding round was led by Conroy and Mark Bakken, Loughlin said. Bakken invested as an individual but is also the founder and managing partner of Madison's HealthX Ventures, he said. Other investors included Madison's Wisconsin Investment Partners, Green Bay's Tundra Angels and Wisconsin River Business Angels of Midwest Wealth Ventures in Plover.
Nurse Disrupted currently has three customers, all of which are homeless shelters in Dane County, Loughlin said. For future growth, it's targeting large affiliated health care systems that can connect Nurse Disrupted with clinics and community partners to help address health disparities.
The Nurse Disrupted solution includes a turnkey video station with hardware, software and stable internet. The company also handles the implementation and provides tech support.
"From site selection to workflow design, training and go-live, we take the lift for health organizations' (information technology) teams," Loughlin said. "Our go-live timeline is four weeks ... you don't have to wait to work with your IT team."
The Nurse Disrupted solution can integrate with the Epic electronic medical records (EMR) system as well as other EMR systems, Loughlin said.
By the end of 2023, Loughlin said she hopes to have more than 2,000 Nurse Disrupted systems in the field. The five currently in use by the company's initial customers have connected more than 14,000 patients to 200 providers, according to the company.
Nurse Disrupted will use the seed funding primarily to build its team, said Loughlin, who serves as CEO. The company has around four other team members and is hiring for a chief operating officer and a senior sales role, among other positions. Loughlin co-founded the firm with Tracy Zvenyach.
