Clinical data management company Carta Healthcare raises $20M

Carta helps eliminate administrative tasks so nurses and clinicians can focus on their patients

In 2021, doctors reported spending on average 15.6 hours per week on paperwork and other administrative tasks. Not only are these tasks time consuming, and boring, but worst of all they they prevent the clinicians and nurses from performing at the time of their license.

Carta Healthcare's basic mission is to use technology, namely healthcare data, in order to take these tasks out of the hands of the healthcare workers.

"That's at the heart of everything that we do here and the different product lines support different tasks. So, it could be filling out clinical documentation, or it could be staff planning or things like that. It's about eliminating administrative overhead, which is very frustrating to every clinician that's out there. And we're here to help," Matt Hollingsworth, the company's co-founder and CEO, told VatorNews.

Carta's Cartographer product searches, analyzes, and interprets patient data across all platforms, standardizes those data into a consistent format, and provides recommendations.

On Wednesday, the company announced a $20 million Series B round from Paramark Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, American College of Cardiology, Asset Management Ventures, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Mass General Brigham, Maverick Ventures Investment Fund, and Storm Ventures.

The datasets created by Cartographer are used by the company's three solutions: Atlas, its AI-assisted data abstraction solution for submitting to clinical registries; Navigator, an analytics tool for solving common healthcare operational challenges; and Semaphore, an integrated development environment unveiled in September that is built for healthcare organizations’ internal data science teams to design and deploy custom applications for analysis and visualization of their data.

For example, a hospital might have dozens or hundreds of nurses whose primary purpose is to fill out forms; when something important happens in the patient's care, a form needs to be filled out to describe it, which then be sent to the government or a quality regulator. How Carta helps is by employs nurses and clinicians and other healthcare workers to fill those forms out for them, with the help of artificial intelligence. 

The company uses both humans and AI to help fill out these forms, as the AI is only able to complete certain sections; sometimes a doctor or a nurse is needed to sign off on certain fields because of regulatory requirements, or they need to have special training to decide whether something is true.

"We have the people that can do this, just like those outsource firms, it's just our people need a lot less time to do the work because of the technology, which is a great thing for hospitals. It's easy to work with us because they're used to that engagement and we don't have to do anything complicated in terms of training them about how the AI works or anything because our people already know that," said Hollingsworth.

By filling out these forms for them, Carta is able to take what would have taken a nurse an hour to do and reduces it a mere 15 minute review. That means that that nurse can then use that time to take care of their patients.

In addition, as part of the package that is unique to Carta, is a stack of industry leading analytics off of the data that is collected with the Atlas product. That means hospitals and health systems can get access to this data in a timeline that can actually have an impact on quality.

"Usually, for most registry submissions, you don't see the data for another quarter, which doesn’t help you, since might even have the same doctor working for you anymore. We can get it within a week, and give you reports on it and give you recommendations o empower people to make good decisions off of that data to improve care," Hollingsworth explained.

All of this results in a cost savings of between 30 and 50% for Carta's customers, compared to using  their own nurses or other data extraction companies.

Carta Healthcare currently serves 16 of the leading health systems in the United States, including Stanford University Medical Center, Common Spirit, and UCSF, Mass General Brigham; it is currently deployed across 245 hospitals, which is three times as many as it had at this time last year; one of the primary things that that's going to be used for to continue scaling that up. 

The funding will also be used to begin scaling into new specialties; currently, Carta's technology is being used in cardio space, as it's a relatively underserved part of the healthcare ecosystem, but the plan it to begin using its technology in areas that include oncology, neuro, and trauma. Finally, the company plans to use the money to scale its team, including in sales and engineering, which will help facilitate its expansion into those new areas. 

Carta is a company that could not have been possible a decade ago, Hollingsworth said, simply because there would not have been enough data. In fact, a few things happened right when the company was getting started, including the regulations around standardized ways of integrating with electronic health record systems, which means that now it gets a big chunk of the data that its need out of the EHR as a result of Fyre.

"One of the things we do is read through notes and notes come from Fyre; 10 years ago, there were still so many handwritten notes and other things that AI is not really that great at processing for the most part, that it just wouldn't have been possible," Hollingsworth explained. 

"We at least need it to be a scanned printed doc, we can OCR things, but we can't read handwritten stuff. So the fact that that is now the exception not the rule, where it used to be the opposite, is a big deal. So, that's very much an enabler for us."

All of this will allows Carta to take these tasks out of the hands of the clinicians so that can do what they were meant to do: see patients, rather than having to do clinical documentation.

"I want that to go from the 55% of time that it is now to something more like 5%. I would be ecstatic if we could manage to at least put pressure on that and get toward that goal. So, for me, that metric is the biggest way of indicating the success of the company," said Hollingsworth.