Provider engagement platform KAID Health raises new funding

The platform integrates all EMR data with insights automatically distilled from medical notes

Providing high-quality care requires providers to have ready access to patient data, as well as the time to translate that information into empathetic treatment. Unfortunately, most of the data needed to provide such care is buried in unstructured medical notes, making it incredibly costly and time-consuming to utilize. Therefore, most analytic solutions have ignored medical notes in developing their population health solutions.

This may have been adequate for helping with select tasks early on, but it meant both doctors and population health managers could not use most of the digital patient data in the EMR, Kevin Agatstein, CEO of clincal analytics and provider engagement platform KAID Health, explained to VatorNews. 

"As providers migrated to value-based care arrangements, and in doing so taking more responsibility for the measured quality and the cost of care, this was no longer a viable approach. Too much revenue from poor coding was left on the table; there were too many quality gaps; and it took providers too much time to find the data they needed," he said. 

KAID Health set out to fix this by making all EMR data, both structured data and notes, equally useful for patient care and population health. Now the company will be able to expand to more providers as it has announced what it calls a "significant new funding" from Activate Venture Partners, Martinson Ventures, Boston Millennia Partners, Brandon Hull, and KAID Health's Board of Directors.

The company's Whole Chart Analysis platform integrates all EMR data, including conditions, medications, and lab values, with insights automatically distilled from medical notes, combining structured patient data with insights from medical notes into a single view of the patient. That allows all care providers to deliver more informed, coordinated care. 

KAID Health invests heavily in technology to understand this medical text because so much of the patient data needed to succeed in value-based care are buried in medical notes; the company not only finds insights in notes but also uses additional AI to prioritize which facts are most relevant to clinicians. It then combines this data with other EMR and claims fact to fully characterize the patient. 

"The notorious thief Willie Sutton was once asked, 'Why do you rob banks? His reply was, 'That is where the money is.' For KAID Health customers, the money, literally in the case of coding and quality measures, is in the notes. However, in contrast to other NLP solutions, which only extract select elements from medical notes to support a specific workflow, KAID Health uses the latest language models to collect all patient data," Agatstein said.

The KAID Health solution can integrate with almost every major EMR platforms and it currently serves several leading regional and national health systems, supporting the primary and specialty care of patients in at least 10 states.

Its customers have seen immediate ROIs, including increased revenues from better coding, better quality scores and related bonuses, and reduced costs and time spent reviewing medical records. For example, The Villages Health, a large provider in Florida, published in the Journal of Medical Practice Management a $9 per patient per month increase on its whole value-based panel after only a few months of using our solution. Other groups have reported over an 80 percent reduction in labor costs to review a medical chart with KAID Health—while finding more data than they did originally.

As a way to verify that KAID Health’s technology summarizes a chart for select tasks as well as clinicians, researchers at UC San Diego Health had the KAID AI model compete with physicians in analyzing patients who were about to undergo surgery. The results showed the AI and the doctors agreeing about 81% of the time, while the vast majority of the remaining 19 percent were things that the AI that found that the clinicians missed.

"As with computing, then internet, then mobile, AI will enable new workflows that do not exist today. In our focus, which is patient understanding, this is especially true. Ongoing review of complete medical records today is a tremendously expensive manual process. As such, it’s only done very sparingly, where the data are particularly valuable, for example clinical trial enrollment or missed billing opportunities, or required by insurance contract or regulation," said Agatstein.

While it’s not done at scale for basic patient visit preparation, care management, transition of care, disease progression tracking, or any of the hundreds of use cases where better data could help, this is changing thanks to companies like KAID.

"With technologies like KAID, the cost to review drops tenfold or more. That means it can be done for every patient visit. Existing chart review workflows will get better, faster, and cheaper—and, more important, the data will simply help more clinicians help more patients in more ways than ever. We are just at the beginning here."

While the exact amount of the new investment was not disclosed, it brings KAID Health's total capital raised to $9 million. The company plans to use the money, in part, to bolster its market footprint among providers and their payer partners, meaning adding to its team over the next year, including formerly front-line clinical users. KAID will also be expanding relationships with other technology companies that can accelerate its time to value, including other population health providers, interoperability solutions, clinical analytic vendors, and EMRs.

The funding will also go toward service expansion, including adding new analytic and related tech-enabled services to better support providers who are in accountable care organizations or other financial arrangements, including traditional fee-for-service models.

Ultimately, what KAID Health wants do to is to make care better, Agatstein said, which can mean many things: better clinical decision-making by providers, a more empathetic journey by patients through the health care system, having the professional aspirations of providers and their staff met, and ensuring providers have the financial resources to adequately fund care delivery.

"Each of these four pillars requires better and easier-to-access patient data. There are over a billion care encounters per year in the United States. Our goal is to have KAID Health help make each one of them more successful, to identify the care encounter that is not scheduled that should be, and to free clinicians from the basic tasks for which they aren’t needed," said Agatstein.

"We will have successes that we never know about, but at the same time we know they happen every day. When our software flags for a doctor or nurse that a patient is at risk for a disease that the provider may not have seen in the chart or that the patient may benefit from an additional treatment that was overlooked, we have succeeded."

(Image source: kaidhealth.com)