What You Should Know:
– Bridge Connector raises $25.5 million in Series B funding to advance interoperability layer for healthcare organizations as demand for integrated health data intensifies during COVID-19 pandemic.
– The investment will support the growth of Destinations, the company’s new integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that connects health data systems using use-case-based interoperability blueprints to speed integrations with major vendors.
Bridge Connector, a Nashville, TN-based interoperability company changing the way health care communicates, today announced it has raised $25.5 million in Series B funding led by Axioma Ventures. The round was also joined by all existing investors, including veteran investor Jeff Vinick, and brings Bridge Connector’s total funding to over $45 million.
COVID-19 Underscores Growing Demand for Integrated Health Data
The last decade has seen an explosion of digital health platforms and the U.S. health care system has taken incremental steps toward achieving interoperability between them. In March, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) issued new rules that force formerly closed vendor solutions to become interoperable.
However, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the urgent need for data liquidity as healthcare providers across the country have struggled to share essential patient information and provide comprehensive care via remote delivery methods such as telehealth. In the face of the pandemic’s disproportionate effect on minority communities, the industry has also recognized the critically important role that social determinants of health — the environments in which we are born, live and work — play in our overall well-being and the need to make this information available to health care providers.
A True Interoperability Layer for Healthcare
Founded in 2017, Bridge Connector provides a suite of vendor-agnostic integration solutions and a full-service delivery model, helping health care vendors, providers, and payers more easily share data between disparate systems, such as electronic health records (EHRs) or patient engagement solutions. The company’s technology is designed to democratize health care by allowing organizations of any size to equitably connect data systems and empower care teams with the most accurate patient data in real-time. Unlike other health care interoperability vendors, Bridge Connector’s unique approach does not lock customers into a forced data model or proprietary APIs, instead of employing a vendor-agnostic integration layer that works across data models without the need for standardization.
The investment will further support the company’s increasing market share in healthcare interoperability and growth of Destinations, a new integration-platform-as-a-service (iPaaS) that connects health data systems using use-case-based interoperability blueprints to speed integrations with major vendors.
Recent Integrations with Key HIT Stakeholders
The new funding comes shortly after Bridge Connector finalized various collaborations with some of the most influential stakeholders in health IT, including Epic, Allscripts, and Salesforce, as well as other system integrators such as MuleSoft. Those collaborations represent calculated steps toward creating a centralized hub of integration solutions for all data platforms that any health care provider or payer can access. The average hospital today uses approximately 16 disparate electronic health records platforms that limit data sharing within the walls of a single hospital, let alone between separate hospitals.
