As a young boy growing up in Michigan, Robbie Felton made home visits with his geriatric social worker mother.
Seeing low-income, elderly and disabled patients so vulnerable sticks with Felton. As a student at Brown University, he became interested in how Medicare and Medicaid integrate to care for these patient populations — so much so that he even dropped out of school for a while to work full-time on the long-term care continuum and learn as much as he could about “highly integrated high-touch models of care for the elderly.”
Coincidentally, while studying at Brown, he realized he wasn’t alone in his desire to help this population when he, Evan Jackson, and Alex Rothberg landed in the same class and presented the same idea – separately – to their teacher. Jackson had been introduced to senior care in high school while working with a private equity mentor who invested in and acquired aged care institutions.
Rothberg recalls, “We had to apply to the class with an idea. The three of us actually submitted the same idea.”
That idea eventually became the genesis of what is now Intus care, a healthcare analytics startup seeking to synthesize financial, clinical, and administrative data to identify trends in long-term care settings by integrating with electronic health records, 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 is for anyone involved in a patient’s care – especially with all the staff shortages prevalent today – to manage the time or ability. have to go through a patient’s entire clinical history to really understand how to better care for them or prevent future illness or falls.
“We’re trying to address some of the core issues around the way healthcare is built,” Felton said. “And the fact that it’s different in nature makes the process of managing and caring for our loved ones so difficult.”
In summary, Intus’ mission is “to catalyze data-driven change” in older adult care.
“At the base layer, we’ve created a solution that integrates with all of an organization’s data and brings out the insights most important to them to tangibly push the needle on outcomes related to the quality of care they provide,” Felton, who is the company’s CEO, told australiabusinessblog.com. “We want to help them scale up a high-quality, high-quality care model as efficiently and effectively as possible to as many participants as possible, nationwide.”
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The trio — who just graduated five months ago — raised $500,000 in pre-seed funding for their venture in March 2020 and then another $1.6 million in May 2021 from some angel investors and smaller institutional investors. They raised an additional $3 million in May of this year, and today Intus announces a $14 million Series A funding led by Deerfield Managementm, with the participation of existing backers Jumpstart, Nova and Collab Capital.
The startup operates as a SaaS company and its customers are the organizations that provide care.
“Our end users are the care coordinators — the individuals who provide care services to the patients on the spot,” said COO Jackson. “We want to provide them with data so they can make informed decisions.”
But really, anyone making proactive decisions — be they care coordinators, facility managers, or social workers — can use Intus’ offerings.
“You can use our tool on two levels,” explains Rothberg, CTO. “One is very individual in terms of how we can get a snapshot of someone’s health in a much more comprehensive way than any other technology.”
“And then zoom out a bit — how do we plan for this person’s health over a six and 12 month period…not just oh, someone fell yesterday. But more of ‘How do we prevent that?’ So if our data shows there’s a pattern of falling and every time it’s between 4 and 6 o’clock.”
The end goal is to not only spot the patterns, Rothberg added, but also help clinicians plan for the future.
Intus plans to use its capital primarily to hire people with experience in scaling healthcare businesses, with a focus on engineers and product people. It also wants to hire sales and marketing personnel, as the three founders and one other person have worked so far to acquire customers. Even with that small crew, Intus says it’s experienced 50% quarter-over-quarter revenue growth this year.
Julian Harris, operations partner at Deerfield Management, said his company invests in healthcare and believes Intus has built “elegant, intuitive tools to serve a range of users…in ways that impact costs and quality outcomes.”
“We believe they have an incredible account management infrastructure and are using insights from their customers to drive improvements to the platform faster than any incumbent in the space,” Harris wrote via email. “They also have deep regulatory and compliance expertise in their team, allowing them to imbue their tools and services with these insights. And the founders are some of the best sales leaders I’ve come across in my career.”
