Healthcare data is a mess and Metriport is here with a broom

You’d have thought that the quantified self movement was stalling out, but Metriport would like to tell you otherwise, thank-you-very-much. We covered the company back in February, and now it has raised $2.4 million to evolve to the next level.

The company went through Y Combinator, and in the process discovered how fractured the healthcare IT space was.

“One major issue that exists in the U.S. today is the fact that many individuals still aren’t able to access their own medical data, largely due to gatekeeping by hospitals and other medical providers. This is because these hospitals and providers use proprietary software systems that make it difficult for patients to access their own medical records or to share them with other providers,” says Colin Elsinga, co-founder & COO at Metriport, in an interview with TechCrunch. “We realized that there was so much work to be done in this space to make the data more accessible and that hardly anyone in the space was working on an open source, non-proprietary solution. Since we’ve always been mission-driven founders, having previously built a consumer health app, we decided to go after this larger problem with the goal of democratizing access to healthcare data and ultimately improve patient health outcomes.”

The funding round came together with investment from Y Combinator, Triple Impact Ventures, Nueterra Capital, Leonis Investissement, Zillionize, VentureSouq, Stonks and MyAsiaVC, along with a number of angel investors.

“The fundraise allowed us to grow our team and accelerate our engineering velocity, which is great since we have a lot of product to build. Additionally, it allows us to pave our way through the various compliance and legal fees tied to entering the healthcare space, which is extremely regulated. Today we’re excited to have launched our first product, our Health Device API, which allows digital health companies to gain access to their users’ consumer health data from various wearables, RPM devices and mHealth apps,” says Elsinga. “The next steps for us in the near term will be launching our second main product, our Medical API, which will allow companies to gain both access to their patients’ medical records and interface with EHRs. Both of these products are open source, which is a huge differentiator in the market.”

The company tells me it raised a $2.4 million seed round at a $20 million valuation, all on post-money SAFEs, and are working to launch its Medical API in 2023.

“Being the first open source solution of its kind, we’re really excited to see what sort of community contributions will come out of this, and how it will enable new companies to make innovations in the space that weren’t previously possible. We will set a new standard for dev-friendliness, transparency and accessibility in the health tech data space,” Elsinga explains.

The company thinks of itself as the medtech equivalent of what Plaid did for fintech; opening up a door for emerging digital health companies to get access to the data they need to grow and scale quickly.

“Based on the volume of customers lining up eager to use our product, we ask ourselves the same thing,” says Elsinga, when asked why nobody is doing this already. “The way we see it is that in every industry, when the existing players stagnate from being comfortable off of profits from the status quo, the market is open for disruption by younger, hungrier and more modern companies. That time is now in the healthcare data space, we know this needs to be built, and we’ll be the company to spearhead those efforts — setting industry standards along the way.”

Healthcare data is a mess and Metriport is here with a broom by Haje Jan Kamps originally published on TechCrunch

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