Collaborative care platform Orb Health raises $3.2M

Orb Health connects patients and providers for more personalized care

The back and forth of sharing health information between physicians and patients can be extremely complex, causing it to be challenging for physicians to keep up to speed, and hard for patients to understand what they're looking at, especially when it isn't personalized.

That's the problem that Orb Health is trying to solve. It's an intelligent, collaborative care platform for population health management. On Tuesday, the company announced that it has raised a Series A fundraising round led by Mt Vernon Investments and with participation from Green Park & Golf and a number of returning seed investors. This new funding brings the company's total raised to $3.2 million.

Founded in 2010, Orb unifies components of well-being into a private HIPAA-compliant cloud, which streamlines access to personal health data, lab results, wearable device data, health apps and services.

"The initial reason for founding Orb was to provide patients with a tool that had intelligence, so they could get meaningful insights into their healthcare," Paul Oran, CEO and co-founder of Orb Health, told me in an interview.

"Over the last six years, healthcare has evolved and grown, with new policies and regulations. We began expanding our technology to not only be a  patient engagement tool, but to also provide a collaborative care platform, to help provider office drive forward, and incentivize them to give better care."

Here's how Orb Health works: a provider network signs a contracts with the company, and, in return, it provides an office platform that is reimbursable for chronic care management. When a patient is enrolled, a nurse will create a care plan using Orb Health's technology that will be published to the patient.

Nurses are required to spend a minimum of 20 minutes of non face-to-face time each month, on each patient. Since many offices are understaffed, and don't have labor to execute that, Orb Health also provides certified, experienced nurses, who work as an extension of the office.

Patients can get data from their doctor and sync it across all their wearable devices, PCs, tablets, and smartphones, so they can better understand their lab results. Healthcare providers can view their patients’ wearable fitness data with track steps, sleep, calories, and more via health visualization applications.

There are currently a few dozen health systems on the platform; the company does not disclose how many patients are currently using it.  The typical patient on Orb Health has at least two chronic conditions, which can be anything that will last longer than 12 months, from diabetes to cardiovascular issues to cancer to arthritis. 

Orb Health is able to deliver both improved patient outcomes and increased revenue for health practices. The physician is able to earn $40 a month per patient through a chronic care management reimbursable code, why the patient gets better results through personalized care.

"This is an exciting business opportunity for physicians to integrate patient engagement. We are able to future-proof their practice for where population health is headed," said Oran. "Our platform is designed for chronic care management and its tangential use cases, but this is an investment for the provider office, helping the practice ro stay compliant and successfully manage their program."

The company will use the new funding to expand its headcount, growing its current team of between 20 and 30 people to at least a few dozen more by the first and second quarter of 2017. 

Ultimately, the vision for Orb Health is to better help physicians and practices deliver better, more personalized care to their patients. 

"In the next five years, I'd love to see our platform serving millions of patients. Id like to see us evolve to the next level of intelligence and automation and seamlessness," said Oran.

"I see mobile technology and the cloud becoming highly sophisticated extension of practices, which we can use to incentivize them. Ultimately, something I value is touching the hearts of patients, and creating meaningful experiences and putting the patient at the center to improve their health."

(Image source: orbhealth.com)