BUSINESS WIRE)--Bridge Connector, an interoperability company changing the way health care communicates, today announced it has raised $25.5 million in Series B financing. The latest round, led by Axioma Ventures, was joined by all existing investors, including veteran investor Jeff Vinick, and brings Bridge Connector's total funding to over $45 million. After achieving over 1000% year-over-year growth in 2019, the investment will further support the company's increasing market share in health care 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.
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 employing a vendor-agnostic integration layer that works across data models without the need for standardization.
"The level of support we have received from our investors and key partners demonstrates the disruptive power of what we are doing," said Bridge Connector Founder and CEO, David Wenger. "The lack of integration in health care has resulted in care teams relying on antiquated technology like fax machines to relay mission-critical information. In the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, it has never been clearer that this inability to share patient data between health care technology vendors creates dangerous care gaps that can mean the difference between life and death for some patients. Bridge Connector is building an ecosystem of connected solutions that is solving this problem."
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 health care 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.
"We believed strongly in Bridge Connector's mission to improve interoperability in health care when we made our seed investment, and they've exceeded all of our expectations along the way," said Howard Jenkins, former CEO of Publix Super Markets, and co-founding partner of Axioma Ventures, which has participated in each of Bridge Connector's funding rounds. "The company's growth in the two years since has validated our belief in the technology and brightened the outlook for an interoperable health care system. With the company on track for 800 to 1000% growth in 2020, we are eager to see how our continued investment will help Bridge Connector impact the industry and create a health care system that works better for patients."
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.
To learn more about Bridge Connector's solutions for achieving health care interoperability, please visit https://bridgeconnector.co/.
