Healthcare access intelligence company DexCare raises $50M

The company spun out of Providence Health in March 2021

COVID has changed the way we look at healthcare: before the pandemic, consumer-facing solutions were under utilized and not really a part of the overall healthcare delivery system. Then in-person clinics shut down and, suddenly, digital health became the only way to access care.  

This has led to a few key shifts, Derek Streat, co-founder and CEO of healthcare access intelligence company DexCare, told me; the first one is a growing appreciation among most stakeholders that digital health is here to stay, with many people expected to continue to access care this way, even after the pandemic is over.

"We believe that 20% to 30% of care will shift from analog to digital going forward, with some disease management programs becoming 100% virtualized," he said. 

The second shift is that there is now a glut of digital health offerings in the market, which "drive confusion among consumers, frustration and additional cognitive load for providers, and inefficiency and ineffectiveness for health systems." 

That means that the ecosystem of digital health offerings needs something similar to the way a computing environment with many applications needs an operating system to make it all work.  

"Finally, the combination of focused digital health applications and interoperable operating systems will unlock significant opportunities to deliver targeted, cost-effective, personalized care, at scale, through data-driven intelligence," said Streat. 

This is what DexCare delivers; spun out of Providence Health in March 2021, its a data-driven intelligence company with the stated goal of making access to healthcare easier and better for everyone. The company provides a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) for health systems that works across all care settings and modalities, including on-demand virtual visits, scheduled in person visits, urgent and retail care, primary care, and even some specialties.  

On Thursday, the company announced a $50 million Series B funding led by Transformation Capital, with participation from all existing investors, Kaiser Permanente, Providence Ventures, Mass General Brigham, Define Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, and SpringRock Ventures. In less than one year, DexCare has closed two oversubscribed funding rounds totaling $71 million.

DexCare has three components of its system that make it unique among other digital health offerings, he said, the first being its demand generation technologies, "which attract and curate audiences to ours customers’ (health systems’) digital front doors by making their various ways of delivering digital care more discoverable online," Streat explained.   

For example, when consumers are searching for care on Google, they are more likely to find DexCare-powered pages in their results.  

Second is its intelligent navigation technology, which leverages its understanding of patient needs and wants. That's combined with provider information and health system objectives in order to ensure consumers are presented with the safest, and best, care options.  

Finally, there's DexCare’s capacity optimization technologies, which automatically allocate health system resources when and where they can be most productively employed. The company does this by matching them to consumers when and where they need care.  

"Similar to the way you have many applications on your computer, there is an operating system that makes all the applications work together to provide the user with a simple experience. DexCare is that operating system for health systems’ digital offerings," said Streat.

DexCare is currently used by health systems across the U.S., including Kaiser Permanente, Providence, Houston Methodist, Community Health Network, Froedtert Health, and others. It has enabled them to attract 30% more new patients, capture 5x downstream revenue, generate $22 per patient encounter in costs savings, and deliver a Net Promoter satisfaction score greater than 90. 

Now that it has this new money, the company plans to grow its team, build out its product, and to expand into additional new service lines and care modalities.

"In addition to continuing to expand the reach of DexCare to additional specialty service lines, DexCare will empower health systems to serve patients across service lines and patient populations, and eventually across other health systems," said Streat. 

"Evolving from a direct one-to-one patient/provider relationship to a team approach where many providers and caregivers have access to the data and tools necessary to effectively treat patients, while also sharing their real-time availability so that matching engines can most efficiently and effectively allocate resources, is the key to scaling access for everyone, particularly in times of workforce shortages."

DexCare’s ultimate goal is to help patients, providers and health systems live in a world where all patients have access to the best treatments and care, he told me. 

"Consumers interact with a unified experience from care discovery, to selection, booking and delivery, all powered by DexCare. Providers and clinic operators access dashboards and analytics to manage their patient flows. Providers also access patient information securely provided via the platform as well as video visit experiences. DexCare is deeply integrated into the EMR so providers maintain a single source of truth in their EMR."