When Robbie Felton was growing up in Michigan, he went on home visits with his elderly social worker mother.
Seeing low-income, elderly, and disabled patients who are the most vulnerable sticks to Felton. While a student at Brown University, he became interested in how Medicare and Medicaid could integrate to care for these patients—so much so that he left school for a while to work full-time in the long-term care continuum and learn more. As for “highly integrated high-touch models of care for the elderly” he could.
Serendipitously, while Brown was studying, he, Evan Jackson, and Alex Rothberg shared the same idea in the same room and learned that he was not alone in his desire to help this nation—individually—for their teacher. Jackson was introduced to the senior care space while in high school when he invested in senior care facilities and worked with a consultant in private equity.
“We had to apply to the class with ideas,” Rothberg recalls. All three of us came up with essentially the same idea.
That idea became the genesis of today’s Intus Care. A healthcare analytics startup that aims to integrate financial, clinical and administrative data to identify trends in long-term care facilities. Integrating with electronic health record, claims and accounting software to highlight clinical risks in elderly patients.
If you’ve ever had an elderly relative in long-term care, you can see firsthand how difficult it can be for anyone involved in patient care — especially with today’s rampant workforce shortages — to pass up time or skills. All of a patient’s clinical history to understand exactly how to best care for them or prevent future illnesses or failures.
“We’re trying to address some of the core issues around the way health care is built,” Felton said. “And being diverse in nature makes the process of managing and caring for our loved ones very difficult.”
In summary, Intus’ mission is to “enable data-driven change in adult care”.
“At the core layer, we’ve created a solution that integrates with all of an organization’s data and shows them the insights that matter most to them so they can push the needle on outcomes related to the quality of care they deliver,” Felton said. who serves as the company’s CEO told TechCrunch. “We want to help them develop a high-quality, high-value care model Nationwide as effectively and efficiently as possible for as many participants as possible.
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The trio — which graduated five months ago — raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding in March 2020 and then another $1.6 million in May 2021 from some angel investors and smaller institutional investors. In May of this year, they raised another $3 million and today Intus is announcing a $14 million Series A financing round led by Deerfield Management with participation from existing backers Jumpstart, Nova and Colab Capital.
The startup operates as a SaaS business and its customers are caregiving organizations.
“Our end users are the care coordinators – the individuals on the ground providing care to patients,” said COO Jackson. We want to empower them with information to make more informed decisions.
But really, anyone who makes proactive decisions – be it care coordinators, facility managers or social workers – can use Intus’ offering.
“You can use our tool in two steps,” explained Rothberg, CTO. “Being very individualized will help you better understand how we can get a real-time view of human health than any other technology.”
“And then zooming in a little bit — how do we plan for this person’s health six to 12 months from now… Not only that, but someone fell yesterday. But more ‘how to prevent?’ So our data shows that there is a fall and each time is between 4 am and 6 am.
The ultimate goal is not only to identify patterns, Rothberg added, but to enable clinicians to make plans going forward.
Intus plans to use the capital primarily to expand its healthcare operations, hiring experienced people for engineers and product people. He also wants to hire sales and marketing staff because so far the three founders and one other person are working to find customers. Even with that small group, Intus E says it hasIt has seen a 50% quarter-on-quarter revenue growth this year.
Julian Harris, working partner at Deerfield Management, said the firm invests in the healthcare industry and believes Intus has “built beautiful and intuitive devices to serve more users while impacting cost and quality outcomes.”
“We believe they have an outstanding account management infrastructure, and are using insights from their customers to drive improvements to the platform faster than any other incumbent in the space,” Harris wrote in an email. They have deep control and compliance across their teams, allowing them to augment their tools and services with these insights. And, the founders are among the best sales leaders I’ve encountered in my career.
