Viewics raises $8M for healthcare analytics

Canvas Venture Fund leads round; Partner Rebecca Lynn joins board

I've been to two funderals/memorials in one month. Suffice it to say, the health of my family and friends has become top of mind. But health, or more accurately health care, in general is increasingly top of mind in Silicon Valley, as investors seek to fund startups that can help clean up an industry sick with waste. 

It's no wonder that companies like Viewics, which stores, gathers, and provides tools to visualize and analyze healthcare data, are getting traction. Sunnyvale, Calif.-based Viewics just raised $8 million in funding, led by Canvas Venture Fund. This after raising under $1 million last year. Since launching in May 2010, the startup has seen significant uptake in customers.

To date, the company has 100 hospitals and labs using the product, paying an average annual subscription in the six figures, said Dhiren Bhatia, Founder and CEO, of Viewics. Bhatia, a Berkeley graduate with a background in data analytics and healthcare, met Rebecca Lynn, Partner at Canvas, while at school. It was this relationship that kept Lynn close to Viewics. But it wasn't until Viewics showed significant growth in the last year that got Lynn interested. 

"We like to invest in the knee of the curve, when things start to really accelerate" said Lynn, who's joining the company's board. "A year ago, a lot of this was in progress."

So what does Viewics do exactly? 

Viewics provides a business intelligence SaaS (software as a service company) product that extracts data, mines it, analyzes it, stores it and makes it visually easy to understand for different groups within an organization, such as clinical, financial and operational. 

"We enable customers to aggregate data across a variety of sources," said Bhatia. "For example, they can bring in clinical data and tie that with their cost and reimbursement data to understand the financial implications of their procedures and services. From a clinical perspective, customers use our platform to measure and manage quality metrics and facilitate regulatory reporting."

Clients using Viewics include large IDNs (Integrated Delivery Networks), which are networks of facilities that provide care, as well as large testing labs. Examples of IDNs, though not clients of Viewics, include Kaiser and Sutter Health. LabCorp is an example of a large testing company. 

Apparently, the number of these institutions adopting healthcare technologies is increasingly dramatically. In a 2012 report conducted by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Surveys report, the number of hospitals adopting health tech more than doubled in two years. The incentive for said institutions is to save dollars as the risk of healthcare spending migrates to providers vs payors or patients.    

"With the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and Obamacare, hospitals have to get a handle of where their costs are coming from and figure out how to drive revenue," said Lynn, adding that these external market forces has helped provide wind behind Viewics' sails. But timing is everything. And getting a product out right when the market needs it or is forced into it, is the best timing any startup could ask for.

They say half of all healthcare spending (about $2.2 trillion) is wasted. It's been a longstanding statement of fact, validated in a PwC study conducted in 2008. In that study, it showed that a lot of the waste came from clinical: where medical care is inappropriate, overused or misused as well as operational: where administrative costs or business processes add costs without creatingt value.

Let's hope companies like Viewics can help reduce the wasteful spending that burden companies and tax payers, while improves the care. God knows we need it.