Carta Healthcare, a San Francisco-based provider of clinical data management solutions, closed a $20 million Series B financing round on Wednesday, bringing its total funding to date to $37 million.
Participants in the funding round include Mass General Brigham, American College of Cardiology, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Asset Management Ventures, Maverick Ventures Investment Fund, Frist Cressey Ventures, Paramark Ventures and Storm Ventures.
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Founded in 2017, Carta’s mission is to reduce the amount of time clinicians spend on mundane administrative tasks. Research published this year in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that U.S. physicians spend an average of nearly 2 hours each day completing documentation outside work hours.
To address this problem, Carta offers three main products — Atlas, Navigator and Semaphore. These products are all powered by Cartographer, Carta’s analytics platform that interprets and standardizes patient data.
Carta’s flagship product, Atlas, is an AI-powered data abstraction tool that hospitals use to submit patient data to clinical registries
“Our technology uses AI to watch an abstractor do their work, and it replicates what they do like a monkey,” Matt Hollingsworth, Carta’s CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “The nice thing about that is that it can save a lot of time after that whole process has played out.”
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Hospitals often employ dozens of nurses whose primary role is to fill out forms for clinician registries, he pointed out. Atlas reduces the amount of time that nurses and doctors spend on these forms while still maintaining accuracy, according to Hollingsworth.
He declared that a huge reason for this accuracy is that Carta uses both clinicians and AI to complete forms — the company’s AI can fill out most sections, but some require verification from a clinician.
“Learning from data abstractors works, but trying to replace them entirely does not,” Hollingsworth said. “The primary thing that our product does is amplify productivity, rather than try to remove the human from the equation — you cannot remove the human from the equation and still get good quality results.”
In addition to Atlas, Carta sells Navigator, an insights tool that analyzes a healthcare organization’s data to produce recommendations on how to improve operational workflows. The company also introduced Semaphore in September — this product is a development platform that healthcare organizations can use to create their own data science tools and AI models.
With its influx of new funds, Carta will increase sales and marketing efforts, hoping to expand its customer base. The company’s technology is currently used at 245 hospitals across 18 health systems, Hollingsworth said. They include Stanford Health Care, Mass General Brigham, CommonSpirit Health and UCSF Health.
Though the company has its eyes set on growth, Carta is not the only provider of clinical data management technology. Take Q-Centrix for example — the Chicago-based company has been providing clinical data management products since 2010. But companies like Q-Centrix are really only competitors for Carta’s Atlas product, according to Hollingsworth. He said Carta sets itself apart by having a diversified product portfolio.
Hospitals can use Carta’s technology to automate data abstraction as well as eliminate operational inefficiencies, Hollingsworth pointed out. For example, Stanford Health Care used the company’s technology to pinpoint the amount of surgical supplies it needed in the operating room and saved $4 million, he said.
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