University of Pennsylvania spinout CareAlign raised $2.3 million in a seed extension round.
Hofmann Associates, Gaingels, and the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels Association participated in the round, along with existing investors Boston Millennia Partners' Founders Fund and local firms Tech Council Ventures, DreamIt Ventures and Front Row Fund. Two unnamed "healthcare provider organizations" that used the company's platform are also investors.
CareAlign is a HIPAA compliant collaborative task management platform integrated into the electronic health record, or EHR, for clinicians and their teams. Its features include shared task lists, care plans, patient documentation and notes. The platform can upload information into the EHR that can later be printed for a paper chart.
CareAlign was founded in 2014 by Dr. Subha Airan-Javia, a former associate chief medical informatics officer at Penn Medicine, and spun out of Penn in 2019. The startup has raised about $4.5 million since its founding. Airan-Javia declined to share the company’s valuation.
The startup will use its new funding to hire three to five employees across sales, engineering and product development positions. The funding will also be used to improve the CareAlign platform by adding new integrations to bring all the data clinicians use into one space.
“When you think about it from a clinician's perspective of having to ingest that information, imagine trying to look at 20 different credit card statements in PDFs on your computer and figure out in five minutes what you spent on food across all your credit cards. It'd be so hard,” Airan-Javia said. “But that's what we have to do for patient care.”
CareAlign’s newest investors have deep roots in the Ivy League. In addition to the Harvard Business School Alumni Angels Association, fellow investor Hofmann Associates is helmed by Donald Hofmann, managing partner at Crystal Ridge Partners and former chairman of the board of trustees at Princeton Health.
The new investors were brought on through local angel networks and through earlier investors’ networks, Airan-Javia said. The group was excited to join a company focusing on the administrative struggles between clinicians, rather than only focusing on physician-patient interactions, she said.
“That's really one of the advantages we have, having been built from inside Penn and then launching the business,” she said. “We had time to really iterate and work on this process of, 'How do we actually help clinicians deliver care better in their workflow?' So people are seeing that value and [are] excited to be a part of the ride.”
CareAlign is live in about 12 facilities, working in acute care, post-acute care, home care and ambulatory settings. Airan-Javia declined to share revenue figures.
The startup is focusing its efforts on the value-based care and at-risk market, which is a form of health care reimbursement that shifts away from visit-based payments and instead ties payments for the quality of care and effectiveness of treatment. CareAlign’s platform can be used to help close communication gaps among providers between and during patient appointments, Airan-Javia said.
“What we can do is provide this living, breathing, constantly evolving platform for people to work together as a team to take care of patients,” she said.
