What You Should Know:
– Former athenahealth founder and CEO Jonathan Bush, today announced the launch of Zus Health (“Zus” pronounced Zoos like the father of Athena) focused on creating the industry’s first shared development platform backed by a shared data record.
– The company is launching with the close of $34M in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), F-Prime Capital, Maverick Ventures, Rock Health, Martin Ventures and Oxeon Investments also participated in the round.
– Zus plans to use the funding to grow its engineering team and invest in the platform, tools and products that support the digital-first healthcare builders with whom Zus partners.
Reversing the Curse of Health Data Isolation
Creating the industry’s first shared development platform backed by a shared data record, Zus aims to deliver health data interoperability by empowering a wave of new, digital-first healthcare builders who will create digital health technologies and services that are cheaper, more customizable and more personalized.
Zus plans to offer tools/capabilities across the tech stack in areas including:
– Healthcare Workflows: A growing library of software tools and services for patient relationship management and provider workflow apps, allowing digital health companies to build their own unique experiences and iterate with ease.
– Data Acquisition and Enrichment: A data aggregation service for pulling together, cleaning and logically joining medical records, claims and other data whose sharing are required. With complete access to codes, data and more, it’s suddenly so much easier to create and maintain a comprehensive understanding of any patient.
– Data Platform: The world’s first industrial-strength, multi-tenant health record infrastructure. A FHIR-native, exhaustively maintained, never overwritten, patient-centric source of truth, it is also paired with the ability for builders to store their own proprietary data in a way that is secure and logically joined to the patient record.
– Patient Identity and Control: A unified record giving patients power over their health data, by enabling authority of personal information across disparate sources of their healthcare journey.
Foundational Partners
The company launches with four builders on its platform including Cityblock Health, Dorsata, Firefly Health and Oak Street Health. The builders will start to use Zus as an “information sidecar” and then proceed to build proprietary apps for consumption and sale over time.
“Healthcare isn’t a three trillion-dollar market. It’s thousands of billion-dollar markets for which the all you can eat buffet technology we used has never been quite a perfect fit. The software needed by a neurologist, a surgeon and a digital health app are all very different. Yet today we try to jam them all onto one thing. We think healthcare is ripe for a platform company that lets everyone write their own front ends, while sharing appropriate data in the back,” commented Zus CEO and Founder Jonathan Bush.
Bush added, “A huge thank you to the brilliant investors that are following me on my second journey to connect healthcare. I learned a great deal with athenahealth, and with all these great partners and the benefit of macro-momentum, I’m confident we can accelerate the arrival of true patient-centric healthcare.”
