What You Should Know:
– Layer Health, a health technology company leveraging advanced AI to transform chart review, raises $21M in Series A funding round led by Define Ventures with participation from other prominent investors.
– The funding will enable Layer Health to scale its AI-powered platform, expand its team, and further its mission to improve healthcare efficiency, reduce costs, and enhance patient outcomes.
AI to Tackle Healthcare’s Data Challenge
Founded by veteran AI and clinical leaders from institutions such as MIT, Harvard, Microsoft, and Google, Layer Health is addressing the persistent challenge of extracting actionable insights from fragmented medical records. Its AI platform employs advanced large language models (LLMs) trained on longitudinal patient data to automate the review and interpretation of both structured and unstructured clinical data at scale, achieving clinician-level accuracy.
How Layer Health’s AI Differs
Unlike traditional software solutions that primarily rely on predefined rules, Layer Health’s AI reasons across a patient’s entire chart, similar to a clinician, enabling it to handle complex and nuanced scenarios. This capability allows health systems to reduce costs and facilitate timely interventions, ultimately leading to better and more personalized patient care, as well as new revenue opportunities.
Use Cases and Value Proposition
Layer Health’s platform is designed to deliver significant value across a wide range of chart review use cases, including:
- Quality Reporting & Clinical Registries: Automating data extraction for improved accuracy and efficiency in quality measurement programs and clinical registries.
- Clinical Research & Real-World Data Abstraction: Accelerating patient cohort identification for research studies and streamlining real-world evidence generation.
- Hospital Operations & Revenue Cycle Management: Enhancing clinical documentation integrity (CDI) and coding processes to optimize reimbursement, reduce denials, and improve financial performance.
- Clinical Decision-Making & Patient Care Optimization: Providing clinicians and care teams with real-time, AI-powered insights for personalized, evidence-based treatment decisions.
Addressing Inefficiencies in Chart Review
The current manual process of chart review is time-consuming, resource-intensive, and prone to human error. Trained professionals dedicate thousands of hours annually to analyzing health records, a costly inefficiency that can drain millions of dollars from health systems, impede clinicians’ ability to practice at the top of their license, and potentially compromise clinical outcomes. Manual chart reviews can also lead to inaccuracies in reporting to clinical registries, increasing compliance risks and limiting providers’ ability to improve care quality.
Early Success and Future Plans
Layer Health’s AI is already delivering significant returns for its early ecosystem partners:
- Health systems: Layer Health’s technology has streamlined quality data abstraction for the Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network, reducing the time required by more than 65%, allowing staff to focus on higher-value tasks.
- Life science and clinical research partners: Layer Health’s technology facilitates real-world data (RWD) abstraction to support clinical research. In collaboration with a leading cancer organization, Layer Health completed RWD extraction for dozens of new patients in a few hours, a process that previously took over a year.
With this new funding, Layer Health plans to expand its offerings, advance its AI models, and deepen partnerships with health systems and other stakeholders across the U.S. and beyond.
“Medical chart review has historically been a costly and time-consuming challenge for health systems, yet scaling it is key to decreasing much of the friction in healthcare. That’s why we’re committed to revolutionizing this process and to building technology that providers trust, empowering them to enhance care quality, drive financial growth and identify new revenue opportunities,” said David Sontag, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder of Layer Health and a MIT professor. “We are thrilled to partner with these stellar investors who deeply understand healthcare, our long-term vision and our technology’s transformative power. By reducing administrative burdens and streamlining inefficiencies, we allow providers to focus on their ultimate priority – delivering exceptional patient care.”
