Virtual care platform Andor Health raises Series A from Microsoft

The company will use the funding to build out its team and to expand outside of the US

Thanks to the COVID pandemic, virtual care and telemedicine are having their moment in the sun, as conditions have made seeing a doctor in person unfeasible. Companies in those spaces are becoming very interesting to investors as well, including Andor Health, a company that combines machine learning and AI with human intelligence to help care teams connect and collaborate with each other.

The company, which provides an AI virtual assistant that delivers data from electronic health record (EHR) in virtual health sessions, announced earlier this week that it raised an undisclosed amount of Series A funding from M12, Microsoft's venture fund. 

"Andor Health has identified a need for technology enablement of virtual health and has developed best-in-class enterprise software for Virtual Heath Enablement powered by artificial intelligence and machine learning-based technology. We believe this is essential to create a sustainable virtual health platform for healthcare organizations," Raj Toleti, CEO of Andor Health, told me.

"This investment from M12 will help us continue to fulfill our mission of helping healthcare organizations care for patients better through automation, communication, and collaboration features that improve workflows and deliver healthcare providers into the new era of virtual health." 

Andor Health currently has two products; one is AndorNow, which enables providers to reach patients with physician-approved educational and advertising content. It acts as an interactive media system that delivers customized, on-demand patient experiences throughout the patient journey, from pre-care to the point of care through post-care interactions.

The other product is called ThinkAndor, which uses AI and machine learning technologies to enhance the patient and provider experience by taking data from EHR into virtual visits, using natural language processing for voice dictated notes and recommending tasks to be pushed into the EHR, using bots to drive configuration of virtual visits, and enabling post-visit triggers and notifications to clinicians and care team members.

The company has four pillars, Toleti explained: virtual health enablement, virtual team collaboration, virtual community collaboration and virtual rounding. For virtual health enablement, for example, that means the platform manages the pre-care, where the ThinkAndor concierge bot configures on-demand requests, appointment scheduling and onboarding. 

"The Andor platform is able to configure first of its kind virtual health experience for patient and provider experience that is able to mimic an actual face to face visit on a virtual platform.  This type of virtual visit orchestration is only possible with the AI and ML capabilities instrumented within the Andor Platform," he said.

The virtual team collaboration aspect is used by team members in acute care, ambulatory care, and post-acute care teams, while virtual community collaboration allows for full ADT (Admissions, Discharge and Transfer) compliance with things like patient consent, team collaboration and consults between attending and primary care physician.  

Finally, with virtual rounding that means monitoring and tele-mentoring facilitates workflows for care teams, including helping providers manage their patients both in the hospital and at home. The platform is also able to be used as an educational platform to help residents and remote surgeons learn remotely.

"This single, integrated solution introduces efficiencies, reduces the overall cost of care, reduces physician burnout, improves patient satisfaction as well as their health outcomes," said Toleti.

Andor's partners include providers, life sciences companies, insurance companies and pharmacies. It currently has over 10,000 contracted providers and hospitals, and over 5,000 contracted inpatient beds, with customers that include two of the five largest payers, and the largest pharmacy globally.

In terms of ROI, ThinkAndor has increased productivity of clinical and administrative staff by 3x, resulted in a 40 percent reduction in abandonment rate of virtual visits and tele-mentoring visits, has had a 97 percent success rate in patient feedback, experienced lower than average waiting room times at 4.6 minutes per patient, and improved to an average of 16.4 minutes of direct one-on-one interaction with a physician or care team member. 

The new funding that the company has will be used for accelerating sales and marketing by expanding into new markets out of the U.S. Additionally, the funds will also be used to invest in enhanced R&D engineering. Andor is also planning to add over 170 jobs in the Orlando, Florida area.

Along with the investment, Priyanka Mitr, Principal at M12, joined the Board of Directors at Andor, while Microsoft/M12 now owns a minority stake in the company.

"Priyanka brings three years of B2B SaaS investing and prior experience serving on four growth-stage company boards to her Andor Health board directorship. Priyanka has a deep understanding of the healthcare ecosystem; she completed scientific research fellowships at Harvard Medical School and conducted macroeconomic research on global healthcare economies of scale via Harvard’s David Rockefeller International Experience grant," said Toleti.

Going forward, Andor's vision is to be the leader in an integrated AI/ML-based conversational virtual health platform globally. 

"What I envision for the future of healthcare is the focus on collaboration capabilities between clinicians and their patients. More patients are putting their trust in the hands of their clinicians, and clinicians feel much more connected with their patients through virtual technologies," Toleti told me.

"By using AI-integrated virtual health platforms in our healthcare systems, this is helping to build sustainability and promise that although technology is changing, care clinicians provide their patients is consistent."