Welcoming MDmetrix to the Founders’ Co-op family

The U.S. spends about twice what other high-income nations do on health care, but with results that are often worse than those countries achieve at much lower cost.

In 2009, in a national effort to improve quality and lower costs, the Federal government launched a huge incentive program to drive the adoption of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), spending an estimated $40 billion over the past decade to implement this data-gathering technology in hospitals across the country.

This massive national investment in data infrastructure laid the tracks for system-wide breakthroughs in data-driven healthcare, but the benefits of that investment have been tantalizingly slow to appear; growth in US healthcare costs continues to outpace inflation, and the category now accounts for more than 18% of GDP

Today we’re proud to announce our investment in MDmetrix, a company that harvests the massive, minute-by-minute data flows generated by EMR systems and applies recent advances in machine learning and data science to help bend the cost curve and improve patient outcomes at the same time.

Those are bold claims, but they’re backed up by hard evidence generated by the company’s pioneering efforts at local healthcare leader Seattle Children’s Hospital (SCH). With support from Seattle Children’s Research Foundation, MDmetrix was originally developed to address physicians’ frustration with the lack of visibility into health outcomes. Once the system was deployed, it quickly became clear that both medical leaders and frontline physicians could use MDmetrix to assess and improve all aspects of clinical operations. The results were dramatic: MDmetrix has enabled its customers to improve care for thousands of patients, while also surfacing millions of dollars of cost savings and revenue enhancement opportunities.

MDmetrix is a commercial spinout from the non-profit Seattle Children’s, and the founding team includes the key technologists and medical leaders that helped develop and prove out the solution for SCH. They’re joined by a seasoned healthcare software leader, CEO Warren Ratliff, who previously played key roles at healthcare giants like McKesson and GE Healthcare, and at successful high-growth healthcare startups like Caradigm (a joint GE and Microsoft spinout).

We’re pleased to be joined in this fundraise by the Washington Research Foundation and Arnold Ventures, co-investors with a long track record of supporting health care innovation and commercialization efforts here in the Pacific Northwest. There’s a long road ahead to prove that the results achieved at Seattle Children’s can be replicated at scale across the industry, but the prize — better care at lower cost for millions of Americans — is well worth the effort.