Using AI to help health systems make better decisions, Hospital IQ raises $25M

The company saw revenue more than double, with 14x utilization, over the last year

Despite all the changes in healthcare and medicine that have occurred over the years, the pressures and challenges that health systems and providers face have largely remained the same. That includes ensuring high quality patient care while balancing resources, such as available beds, nursing staff, and operating rooms. They have also have to coordinate patient discharges, make sure they have adequate nurse coverage, maintain effective OR utilization, and make sure that they have the right information about current and upcoming capacity. 

All of this is being done while still relying on spreadsheets, phone calls, texts and even faxes to make critical operating decisions, said Rich Krueger, CEO of Hospital IQ, a company that uses technology, including artificial intelligence, prescriptive actions, workflow automation, and streamlined communication, to help health systems to make better decisions around patient access, care delivery, and staff productivity.

"This combination of capabilities, known as intelligent automation, gets the right information, with the right action, to the right person hours, days, and weeks in advance, ensuring alignment of actions and priorities across the enterprise. The result is a new level of peak operational performance that will not degrade over time," he said. 

On Monday, the company announced a $25 million Series C round of funding led by Baxter Ventures, the venture investment arm of Baxter International, and Health Velocity Capital. Existing investors Pierpoint Capital and Allscripts also participated.

Founded in 2013, the Newton, Massachusetts-based Hospital IQ platform works with hospitals and health systems to help the, achieve digital transformation by being what Krueger calls, "the primary enabler to a culture of improvement."

The platform can identify the most impactful discharges and potential discharge barriers, streamline communication across care teams, identify staffing misalignments and allocate staff based on patient care needs, and optimize schedule templates based on volumes and trends.

As a result, Hospital IQ's customers have seen thousands of hours repurposed weekly due to streamlined communication, while employees have seen over 30% improvement in key performance indicators. In addition, hospitals and health systems see hundreds of hours of OR time released monthly, along with hundreds of additional procedures, and an over 5% increase in OR Utilization.

Patients, meanwhile, have seen a 15% reduction in length of stay, and a 50% reduction in emergency department patients leaving without being seen 

"We are going to provide a better experience that makes everyone’s job easier which is why our platform is so broadly adopted," said Krueger.

"Health systems and hospitals of any size can benefit from our solutions. Our clients range from multi-campus health systems with hundreds of ORs and thousands of beds to small regional hospitals with a couple ORs and under 100 beds."

Hospital IQ's customers includes Hospital for Special Surgery, Health First, MercyOne, and University Hospitals. Over the past year, the company's revenue more than doubled, its customer base grew by 50%, and utilization of the platform increased 14x, as the COVID pandemic made the company's software more of a necessity. 

"COVID-19 highlighted that hospitals need to transform the way they run their operations to be more proactive, agile and flexible. It shined a light on operational challenges including the limited visibility into all aspects of operations," said Krueger.

"Access to and use of predictive AI capabilities to predict census and overall demand became critical. With these predictions in hand, leaders will be far more prepared to make more informed staffing decisions, better purchasing decisions for critical supplies and equipment, and more effective capacity decisions." 

Hospital IQ says it will use the new funding to further develop the product development, as well as to build out its team across all business units, growing it by 50% by the end of this year end and doubling it in the next 12 months, specifically across sales and marketing, and client services. The company will also use the money to enter new partnerships, and to deepen its existing partnerships with Allscripts and Cerner.

Hospital IQ's mission is to help health systems with the challenges they've been facing for years, and which have only been exacerbated by COVID.

"When we started the company, our ultimate goal was to build an operations management platform that could scale to support the over 6,000 hospitals across the US and leverage advanced technology, such as machine learning-based AI, and lean methodologies to truly improve and sustain operational effectiveness and ultimately improve the bottom line," said Krueger.

"Based on the real-world results our customers have realized, our platform has proven to be unmatched in its depth, adaptability, and ability to drive quantifiable operational improvements for our customers and their patients. We’re excited to scale our operations alongside industry demand and enable more health systems to optimize their performance while providing high-quality care as we advance healthcare’s digital age."