– Seattle-based health IT innovator Twistle raises $16M in Series A funding from two major healthcare investors: Health Enterprise Partners (HEP) and MemorialCare Innovation Fund (MCIF).
– The funding investors are healthcare-centric: MCIF is a strategic healthcare investment fund wholly-owned by a healthcare system and HEP is a private equity firm that invests exclusively in healthcare services and IT companies.
– The funding will accelerate the delivery of personalized care guidance through care process automation.
Twistle has secured $16 million in Series A funding led by Health Enterprise Partners (HEP) and MemorialCare Innovation Fund (MCIF). This announcement was made today at the HTLH 2019 Conference in Las Vegas, Nev. Healthcare enterprises such as Providence St. Joseph Health in Renton, Wash., use Twistle’s scalable technology to manage outreach to patient populations by automation of communications, data entry and patient education. The impact of Twistle’s app positively affects 94% of patients who use it for their various episodes of care via patient engagement, pre- and post-surgery.
Twistle’s Expansion Plans
The Series A funding round will be used to advance Twistle’s mission of helping care teams optimize every patient’s needs by automating proactive conversations that inform timely actions. Twistle wants to accelerate expansion in the provider and life sciences markets, and fuel innovation with a focus on human-assisted automation that helps organizations continuously improve patient care.
The selection of HEP and MCIF was due to their mutual commitment to deliver large-scale intelligent transformational solutions to the healthcare industry. “We are particularly impressed with their partnerships with leading provider and payer enterprises, and their records of helping innovative healthcare technology companies succeed,” said Kulmeet Singh, CEO of Twistle. “We think they are the ideal partners to help us lead healthcare into a new era of communication effectiveness.”
A key application factor of Twistle is the ability to be custom-made to the exact specifications that health systems or life sciences companies need in order to deliver desired results and KPIs. Enterprises are free to innovate on Twistle’s process automation platform and configure novel pathways to engage patients and consumers through any channel: mobile messaging apps, patient portals, interactive voice response and simple, secure text messaging.
“If we want to deliver great care and bend the cost curve in this country, we cannot continue following the status quo. We have to use automation to increase the effectiveness of our care teams and find better ways to motivate patients to take ownership of their own health,” stated Singh.
Patients download the Twistle app, where they receive educational materials, reminders, checklists, surveys, communication tools and more, all customized by their provider’s care team. The intent is to make care management simple and care plans accessible, by providing the right information at the right time via the app.
Brant Heise, managing director of MemorialCare Innovation Fund, said that the Twistle technology makes a huge difference for patients. “Large health systems are confronted with a dizzying array of apps to educate and guide patients, each targeting a different disease or condition, with a unique app experience,” he said. “Twistle enables health systems to eliminate many point solutions and consolidate on a single platform that integrates with the existing IT ecosystem. Allowing patients to engage through messaging standardizes their experience and makes adoption simple.”
