Seattle-based Providence Health & Services and Pittsburgh-based UPMC Enterprises have invested in a digital healthcare startup, Xealth. Xealth’s digital platform will enable physicians and clinicians so as to prescribe customized digital healthcare content, services, and apps.
UPMC and Providence Health & Services invested in Xealth
Xealth was incubated within Providence’s digital innovation program in Seattle, and it has announced that $8.5 million investment has been done, which has been led by DFJ Venture Capital. It has also announced the launch of its digital prescribing and the analytics platform. Further, part of this investment came from the venture arm of University of Pittsburgh Medical Center, UPMC Enterprises. Milwaukee-based Froedtert Health and Hennepin Healthcare System in Minneapolis were also involved in the investment.
What is Xealth capable of?
Officials attest that with Xealth, the clinicians can prescribe and even track the use of educational health content, devices to help monitor care and apps for disease management, all from their EMR charting interface. Further, Xealth aggregates and also filters a variety of content sources in a care provider’s existing EMR workflow, which is aimed at simplification of the ability to create a customized experience for the patient.
The clinicians can even discuss these digital health tools with their respective patients during appointments, schedule reminders and can even track usage afterward in order to ensure patients use them. Furthermore, the patients can access these digital health prescriptions from the current health system’s secure patient portal online, such as Epic’s MyChart.
Words from Mike McSherry
Mike McSherry, co-founder of Swype (predictive text technology) that has been sold to Nuance, and several Swype team members have joined Providence last year as executives-in-residence. They have joined so as to find new innovations in healthcare. Mike McSherry and the team founded Xealth as a result.
McSherry said, ‘Providence and UPMC are our ideal launch partners, given their size and focus on the next generation of healthcare’. McSherry further added, ‘Together, we’ll be able to better measure the impact of more engaged patients on their health outcomes, and the effectiveness of prescribed content, apps, and services. We’re inspired by the possibility of this platform and its potential to become an industry-wide solution’.
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Date: June 20, 2017
