Noteworth raises $5 million so physicians can better deliver digital care

The company allows clinicians to manage patient data and track their conditions remotely

While COVID has accelerated the adoption of digital health technologies, with a push toward telehealth and virtual care, there are still numerous issues that healthcare providers face when trying to implement these tools, not least of which is the cost. There's also the fact that they often have to go to multiple different vendors to provide these services for their patients. All of that makes it difficult for both sides to keep track of, and to take full advantage of, what's being offered.

The real competition, he explained, comes from traditional administrative tools that are trying to figure out how to get into care delivery. They might be traditional electronic medical record vendors or practice management vendors that are adding in features that "make it seem like they could engage a patient."

"I guess maybe the best, and worst, example of that is things like a patient portal. That's a classic example of an administrative tool being forced into a consumer interaction. What you get from that is not something that's ideal for either party. However, those are largely entrenched organizations, and it's an interesting business paradigm, but the minute someone sees our product they see right through to what we focus on, and what the existing vendor doesn’t," said Williams. 

The new funding that Noteworth has raised will be used to expand the team; the company recently grew from 11 to 40 employees, and plans to hire even more until it's between 60 and 75. It will be hiring across sales and marketing, as well as in its engineering and product support side as it brings on larger and larger clients.

The funding will also go toward product development, which means expanding its core services, but also going into new vertical that will take Noteworth "from being purely a tool for engaging the patient, and that allows it to move into, ultimately, what population health aspires to be, and that's the next iteration for Noteworth, is moving into a true real-time population health platform," William explained. 

That means, in part, doing more with data, and "evolving our platform into itself being able to be more proactive. Right now we're able to see and assess things but we want the platform to able to to guide and drive certain engagements and behaviors, both on the patient and on the clinician side that acts more like a therapeutic, acts more like an intervention, than an alert. That's a really interesting thing that we're building into," he said. 

The company is also looking to expand access, specifically into rural areas, which may not have the same type of resources that suburban or urban environments do.

"We give healthcare organizations the way to develop and flex services into those areas quickly and efficiently and maximize the impact of that. It should make healthcare more effective and more cost effective for those services. An emergency room visit is way more expensive than a primary care visit, and if you can move the primary care modality, or the specialist care modality, into something that is virtual and available to patients that otherwise wouldn't have had that, they would have only had to drive to a critical access hospital or their local emergency room, then that makes a massive impact."

Ultimately, Noteworth's goal is to take healthcare and use technology to really help the doctor and the patient, something that Williams believes recent advancements in healthtech, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning, haven't done. In fact, he believes that these technologies "actually act more negatively to impact real change than they have to help it," by being a distraction from the real needs that weren't being met. 

"You've been to the doctor recently, it still looks like 1980 in the doctor's office because we're waiting for the silver bullet. We're waiting for that thing, we're waiting for something out of Star Trek's that can scan you and you’re healed," he said.

"Without something like COVID, or other things that laid bare the need to truly innovate, the healthcare industry may have still been sitting on our hands a little bit, waiting for the types of changes that could be made and the impact that it could have been delivered from that."

Williams also believes that, so far, technology innovations have only favored a small percentage of people who have access.  

"We have known for a very long time that to measure a patient effectively when they're not in front of you, you can manage things like diabetes factors better than you could if you only took a look at a patient A1C lab test when they show up at the doctor's office. We've known that forever," he told me.

"Unfortunately, that technology has only going been present in constant glucose monitors, which only really apply to a very small percentage of patients. So, what we know has been forced into this tech vacuum that makes it inaccessible and addressable to a larger portion of the population. We've done that in a lot of other places."

Noteworth, on the other hand, wants to make that technology accessible to every patient, which can be done if the focus is on change, and not just technology for technology's sake. And that means getting the technology up to speed, ideally to where digital banking and digital shopping are now. 

"If technology does its job, that means the average doctor is able to deliver truly personalized medicine to hundreds, if not thousands, more patients because technology is enabling them to do so. What we're building is the platform to do that. And obviously I've invested in Noteworth being that being that thing, but as healthcare in general is, I mean it's beneficial for all of us for us to get there."