In 2016 when
and I met Abhinav, Sandy and Kanav, there wasn’t a single example of a vertical software company built from India to the US, let alone one targeting US healthcare. Yet, the burning need was obvious to us: By 2009 I had trained and operated in the emergency rooms across Chicago and New York and spent countless frustrating hours grappling with the lack of a single source of truth for my patients and the ability to find out how they were doing once I had discharged them. It was heartbreaking to see many of them bounce back into ER — in most cases avoidably so! — after I had spent countless hours fixing them the week before. But, I also realized why no quality health software companies had emerged in the prior decade: either founders failed to understand healthcare, or ones that did, lacked the chops to build the best in class technology. Back to Innovaccer in 2016: Our deepest belief came from Abhinav, Sandy and Kanav themselves. We knew they were hearing their customers closely, had a bold ambition and loved building world-class technology. The potential of this team was clear to us.
Fast forward today, Innovaccer is the go-to Healthcare Cloud Platform used by the likes of Banner, CommonSpirit; #1 KLAS-ranked in the population health category used by the likes of Mercy; and the 3rd party developer platform of choice for companies like Roche. I had written earlier that Healthcare Cloud Platform is a $100B+ business opportunity. Yet what gets Abhinav, Kanav, Sandy and the entire Innovaccer team most excited is the ways in which a modern data stack could make physicians more successful and help them work hand-in-hand with payers, life sciences companies and others to improve patient outcomes.
Where the heck is the infrastructure?
Dani and Nick at Union Square Ventures wrote that “First, apps inspire infrastructure. Then that infrastructure enables new apps”
In healthcare applications like clinical decision support and remote patient monitoring were imagined, but the infrastructure to enable them just didn’t show up. Existing platforms such as the EMRs were either not open for partnering or not built ground up for flexibility and 3rd party development — how could they be, the cloud wasn’t known to anyone when they were laying the bricks of their on-premise infrastructure? As a result, many powerful applications that could improve patient lives died before they could break out of startup garages.
Innovaccer is building the world class data infra that healthcare has long needed. Innovaccer has leveraged the health and data services provided by those clouds to normalize, enrich, verify and deliver the highest quality, usable data to applications, data scientists and healthcare operators to improve outcomes.
And Innovaccer is not waiting for EMRs to release HL7 Fast HealthCare Interoperability Resources (FHIR). It is already the market leader with deployments spanning 80+ interconnected EMRs, 1,000+ client locations and 37K+ providers and 24M unique patient lives. That’s what hustling scrappy founding teams do — they just get shit done.
I spoke with Jen Brooks, VP at Banner Health to ask why Banner chose Innovaccer. And she said “What matters most to us is the data platform, especially how cleanly it aggregates and normalizes data … Innovaccer actually opened up the platform for us, and let us see all the data quality checks behind the scenes”
Hospitals CXO’s ask, where is the money?
Every time I would speak with a hospital CIO or CEO in private he would ask why should I move to the cloud? I already have so much data, why do I need anything else? What business problem does it solve for me?
What good is a bag of tomatoes in your refrigerator if you don’t have the food processor to make soup? Innovaccer is the food processor helping health systems make soup from their data. Data ‘activation’ matters most for value creation.
And Innovaccer is activating customers’ data in a way, that is:
- Delivering clear RoI
- Expanding use-cases
- Lightning fast go-live in weeks
- Complementing existing investments irrespective of clients’ EHR or cloud vendor
Innovaccer’s in-house Population Health Management suite has generated more than $600 million in savings — MercyOne alone saw 6% lower readmissions. Using the Innovaccer Health Cloud, Banner Health saw annual IT savings of $4M and clearer insights on where to cut and where to double down future investments. Steward Health is using Innovaccer’s CRM suite which is natively integrated with the electronic medical records, provides support teams with an instant 360 view of patients while they’re on calls with them, and the ability to read and write to the source of truth. Bon Secours Mercy Health is using Innovaccer Health Cloud to build a smarter Supply Chain. What’s next? Clinical Research, HR, Revenue Cycle, Digital Therapeutics, Connected Medical Devices, Patient experience and much more.
Health System + Innovaccer = ‘Tech-Viders’
Innovaccer is already working with top 20 US health systems on co-creating Tech-native Modern Provider Systems that will create value in the range of $10–50B each. If Livongo is a $15B+ tech-vider for chronic conditions, why can’t a top health system launch a similar sized company combining its own best-in-class medical expertise with Innovaccer’s technology? This is not a pipe dream. There are already two $1B+ tech-viders, including Cityblock, using Innovaccer.
3rd party developer ecosystem
A whole LOT MORE applications will be needed to serve the missing needs I felt as a physician in the emergency room. Innovaccer knows well it can’t build everything itself — it has opened the platform for 3rd party developers to imagine new use cases. Like Google Maps and Twilio powered ride-sharing and food-delivery, we believe Innovaccer will usher a whole new era of new companies and business models.
Patient data + data activation platform + physician access + ability to read-write inside the physician workflow = Innovaccer Superpower for any 3rd party developer on day one
Roche is a great example of what a thriving partnership looks like: 20+ Roche engineers are using the Innovaccer platform for building clinical pathways that, when adopted, could become the gold standard in clinical decision support for physicians. Roche has been able to drive development of these applications 10x faster than if they had developed them from scratch.
When I spoke with Sukhveer Singh, Global Head of Healthcare Insights, Roche, he said “Without the longitudinal patient data that Innovaccer’s data platform provides us, we can’t do what we do … and we haven’t even spoken about digital therapeutics that we could power in the near future.” Health systems also see this as a win-win. Back at Banner Health, Jen added “If I have to partner with each and every software vendor directly, it’s much more complicated for me than if they come to me via Innovaccer. Our goal is to get Innovaccer to be the data platform for everything.”
Big ambition
Innovaccer just turned into a $3.2B company with $150M in new investments led by Mubadala Capital and joined by several existing investors, as well as new investors.
Abhinav and I caught lunch last week and he shared “Our customers want many more products — each one of them spends $100M+ on Health IT annually and we are addressing <10% of their problems. How should we think about prioritizing for 2022?” I know this team has a long way to go because it is still listening keenly to its customers and has ever bold(er) ambitions.
If you’re a health system CEO thinking about growth or a CIO thinking about cloud, or a tech operator, or a 3rd party developer looking to make a serious dent, consider spending 30 mins with Innovaccer to learn more. Drop me a line at vaibhav@lsip.com. I’d love to hear from you.
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