Analytics platform Healthentic raises $3.75M

Healthentic gives data and actionable results to help companies improve the heath of their workforce

(Come mingle with hundreds of top venture capitalists representing $10B-plus in capital under management, including Khosla Ventures, Greylock and Javelin Venture Partners, and learn from founders/CEOs including Marco Zappacosta, Co-founder & CEO of Thumbtack and Adam Goldenberg, CEO of JustFab, Slava Rubin, Founder & CEO of Indiegogo, at Vator Splash Oakland on April 22nd and 23rd. Get your tickets here!)

As healthcare continues to go digital, there is more and more data out there to help doctors give patients better care, and for the cost of healthcare to go down. The problem is that getting insight into that data is pretty difficult. It takes a lot of time and patience to wade through enourmous amounts of data.

Analytics platform Healthentic is here to help, though, giving data and actionable results to help companies improve the heath of their workforce. The company just announced that it has raised $3.75 million in funding on Thursday, from Corvesta, Inc., Hawaii Dental Service, WDS Holdings LLC, and WYSSTA Investments, Inc. This latest round brings it total funding to nearly $20 million.

Founded in 2009 as a way to explore the link between medical and dental data, Healthentic now offers two products.

The first is its Dental Action Report, in which the company sells data to dental insurance companies, thereby giving them insights into what is happening with patient's oral and total health. The product has deployment across 19 states, and covers nearly 11,000 companies.

Its second product is its Population Health Dashboard, which helps businesses by giving them critical insights using the power of whole health informatics to make changes to their plans and programs in order to lower costs while improving overall employee health and productivity. This is a newer product, and so far has only 50 companies as customers. 

"Getting insight into health data is very difficult to do, but we have that insight. higher level. Other tech companies are built on data and analytics. Pretty much of every aspect of corporate spending and investment, they some idea, or a very good idea, of how to optimize that spending," Jeff O'Mara, Chief Executive Officer of Healthentic, told me in an interview. "For healthcare, which the number two spend on employees behind salaries, there is very little insight that companies have to optimize."

Due to there being so little insight into the data, companies instead turn to other types programs, such as wellness, to try to improve the health of their employees, believing it will save healthcare costs. These are more wasteful and inefficient, and don't lead to lasting results. 

By using Healthentic, though, companies can makes sense of data that they are getting from health insurers, and then put a clinical lens and business intelligence on it. Healthentic then helps them understand whats going on in the health population of the employee base so that employers can determine where there are savings opportunities, and how they can fix those holes.

For example, an employer might wants its employees to get a flu shot, so that they don't get sick and hurt productivity, or get other people in the office sick as well. They might find that workers are either not getting their shots, or that they are paying much higher rates for them than that have to. So, with that data in hand, the company might have a flu shot fair, to allow workers to get their vaccination, and to pay much less for it than they would have elsewhere. 

In another instance, a company might find that its workers are not going to the doctor, so they could potentially change their healthcare plan to have lower co-pays or no co-pay at all for hospital visits, in order to encourage them to see a doctor more often.

These types of solutions work much better than simply behavioral changes, O'Mara told me, as those other types of changes typically revert back to old habits, while changes in plans have much bigger impact.

"With plan design changes, its easier to be certain, and have control over it. Change can be difficult, and against human nature. Wellness does not deliver improved health costs because people stay in program, and lose 50 lbs, but then the program ends. Do they continue to do things without accountability, a group or trainer? Or do they revert? Over and over people revert," he said. 

The numbers bear out the effectiveness of Healthentic's platform: for every thousand covered lives, including the employers dependents, Healthentic has been able to uncover an average annual savings of $180,000.

There are other similar companies out there also providing healthcare data, including Verisk, but O'Mara told me that Healthentic is "better, cheaper and faster."

"What our folks tell me who have used Verisk before, they provide paid claims report, which are hundreds of pages. And they charge a fee for that," he said. "That report would need to be analyzed by a clinical group. Plus you need a talented database administrators who is knowledgeable in healthcare."

"All of those things you need to for Verisk, each one costs more than to use Healthentic."

The company will use the new funding to build out its product, as well as its team. It currently has 23 employees and plans to add "a few awesome folks, and experts who we would work with."

"We understand whats going on with an employee population that they would spend millions on, and we give them the best opportunity  to optimize and save money," O'Mara said. "There's no easy way to do it, but we are far in the lead making it easy to understand. Some may thing that that's a simple thing, but making that complex mountain of data into actionable insights is vert complex."

(Image source: