What You Should Know:
– Watershed Health, a New Orleans, LA-based provider of real-time care coordination solutions raises $13.6M in funding led by First Trust Capital Partners with participation from FCA Venture Partners, Create Health Ventures, Impact Engine, 450 Ventures, LDH Ventures II/Launchpad Digital Health, MassMutual Ventures, Capstar Partners and Wanxiang Healthcare Investments.
– The investment will fuel the company’s mission to combat uncoordinated care, a major contributor to wasted healthcare spending and negative patient outcomes.
The High Cost of Disconnected Care
Uncoordinated care, where patients’ medical information and needs are fragmented across different providers, is a significant burden on the healthcare system. Estimates suggest it costs the US a staggering $340 billion annually, exceeding the combined costs of heart disease and cancer. This lack of coordination leads to:
- Duplication of tests and services
- Medication errors
- Delayed or missed diagnoses
- Patient confusion and frustration
- Poorer health outcomes
A study published in the New England Journal of Medicine Catalyst revealed that nearly 70% of preventable, cost-driven adverse patient outcomes can be attributed to provider behavior, highlighting the critical need for improved communication and collaboration.
Watershed: A Unified Platform for Seamless Care Coordination
Watershed Health tackles these challenges by providing a single, comprehensive platform for real-time communication and information exchange between a patient’s entire network of clinical and non-clinical providers. This platform offers several key features:
- Shared Patient Record: Enables real-time exchange of critical information, including clinical documents, current health status, social determinants of health, and contact details.
- Improved Communication: Streamlines communication between providers, facilitating the creation and execution of effective care plans.
- Data-Driven Decisions: Provides up-to-date, relevant data for informed decision-making.
- Integration with Existing Systems: Seamlessly integrates with existing healthcare IT infrastructure, including HIEs and EHRs.
- Virtual Workspace: Offers a dedicated virtual workspace for providers to collaborate on patient care.
- Promoting Accountability: Generates proprietary quality measures, fostering transparency and accountability amongst providers and payers.
Proven Success and National Expansion
Founded in 2013, Watershed began serving the Alabama Gulf Coast region. The platform’s effectiveness in reducing costs and improving patient outcomes led to organic adoption across the state, including among health plans. Driven by this success, Watershed is poised for national expansion to address the nationwide issue of uncoordinated care.
“My work as a physician has shown me the consequences of uncoordinated care – the missed connections and the inefficiencies. It’s frustrating for providers and it’s harmful to patients. I started Watershed because I knew a better healthcare system was possible, and I wanted to solve the problems I was seeing in my community. Little did I know that Watershed would ultimately be advancing transformational change for the entire healthcare sector,” said Dr. Chip Grant, an interventional cardiologist and founder and CEO of Watershed Health. “Our work to drive coordinated care across healthcare communities is unbelievably compelling to both payers and providers, and we are expanding to help solve the problem of fragmented care nationwide.”
