A Richmond health care analytics startup is preparing to launch two new products that aim to help health systems improve their business operations.
Time Study has implemented its platform at more than 80 hospitals across the country. It pulls data on how physicians and health workers use their time while at work, allowing hospitals to improve efficiency and maximize revenue. The company was founded five years ago after it was spun out of founder and CEO Kishau Rogers’ previous company.
Rogers said Time Study is gearing up to roll out a timestamp application and a comparative analytics product. The timestamp application analyzes data about a particular worker at a particular moment in time. The snapshot is combined with other data to provide insights to improve a worker’s efficiency.
“It is an algorithm that determines when is the best time to study what a person is doing,” Rogers said. “It uses quite a few characteristics. It is based on the person’s role and whether they have been studied before. It takes a snapshot of a moment in your workday. If you get enough moments, you get a wholistic view of what a person does.”
The comparative analytics product helps hospitals better understand efficiency improvements. It takes data from Time Study’s other clients and compares them to a particular hospital. The information will be given to executives and help them better understand where they stand.
“It’s one of the things we get asked the most,” Rogers said. “They want to know where they compare to other health care systems.”
The new features are set to be rolled out by the end of the year, Rogers said.
Rogers said Time Study is different than other products in the worker efficiency space. For one, she said it is the only platform focused health care. Most other platforms are not designed for a specific industry. As well, the platform can collect and analyze data on the individual level and at the organizational level.
“It is designed to be one single platform that a finance officer can use, a medical affairs officer can use and an operations officer can use,” Rogers said.
The platform can help hospitals improve on lost billing. Often, doctors and other health workers must recall what services they provided to an individual. They can often forget what they’ve done. The platform uses its multiple data sources to recover lost billing opportunities. The increased revenue from each physician at a hospital averages between $250,000 to $500,000 a year, Rogers said.
The company has 20 employees, and Rogers foresees the company adding five new employees this year, including a chief data officer. The company grew 130% last year and expects to grow by a similar amount this year, Rogers said. She added that the company is profitable but declined to give revenue figures.
In total, the company has raised $7 million in funding. Rogers said she expected the company will seek more funding next year.
“The last round was in the fall,” Rogers said. “It was an early venture round. Our major investors are not in Virginia. Hearst, the media company, is one of them. We are in their portfolio."
Other investors include Beaverton, Oregon, venture capital firm Elevate Capital and Nashville, Tennessee's Jumpstart Nova, a VC firm focused on investing in health care IT and analytics startups created by Black founders.
The company is Rogers’ fourth startup. Employees are based in Richmond, New York City and Portland, Oregon. Like many companies, employees have become more disbursed since the pandemic.
The real challenge, Rogers said, is the long sales cycle. Hospitals are large organizations and take months or even years to decide on what services and platforms to employ.
“Making a simple decision to add a new platform requires quite a bit of sponsorship and advocacy internally from executives,” Rogers said. “To adopt a new technology, you have to get everybody aligned about what that means operationally.”
Time Study has never lost a client, she noted.
