There is an urgent need for innovation in primary care delivery — inadequate access for patients, poor care coordination, and a broken reimbursement system are well-documented challenges facing the field. Despite promising efforts and important pilots to overcome these obstacles, wide-spread innovation and improvement has been constrained by financing structures that incent the piecemeal, volume-driven delivery of clinical services rather than promoting care redesign. Amidst these prevailing reimbursement models, sources of funding for innovation in primary care delivery are limited.

In recent years, a handful of primary care leaders, dissatisfied with the pace of change, have approached the structure and financing of primary care transformation through a radically different model: for-profit, venture capital-funded enterprises. And many leading investors from the traditional health care spaces of biotech and pharmaceuticals—such as F-Prime Capital Partners, Maverick Capital, Polaris Ventures, and GV—have funded primary care service enterprises.

To better characterize this growing trend, we used publically available information to explore how three prominent innovators—Iora Health, One Medical Group, and Qliance Medical Management—are leveraging venture funding to support primary care redesign.

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As part of the Vermont Health Care Innovation Project, the Green Mountain State has tapped Boston-based PatientPing for data exchange among its hospitals.

Vermont officials and healthcare professionals will announce the adoption of PatientPing across the state’s healthcare providers today at Vermont Blueprint for Health 2016 in Burlington.

The technology is expected to boost medical information transparency among previously disconnected healthcare providers.

“Our state has come together in this partnership to launch a progressive initiative dedicated to improving the way Vermonters receive care,” said Lawrence Miller, senior advisor and chief of healthcare reform at the Office of the Governor, in a news release.

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VitalWare™, a leading provider of revenue cycle SaaS solutions to healthcare organizations, announced today that it has received a growth investment from F-Prime Capital Partners (formerly Fidelity Biosciences), a global venture capital firm investing in healthcare and technology.

Since its founding in 2011, VitalWare has created and launched six SaaS products to build an intuitive suite of cloud-based Analytics, Documentation, Coding, Billing and Auditing technologies.  The backbone of this suite is the patent-pending, proprietary medical terminology engine, ICD Sherpa™, which guides physicians, clinical documentation staff and coders through the increased specificity requirements found in the new ICD-10 code set. VitalWare is the only vendor that provides a technology that enables consistent search results to all three of these major constituents. The Company was recently ranked #123 on the 2015 Inc. 500 list of the fastest-growing private companies in America.

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