SAN FRANCISCO — Fold Health, the first interoperable digital health tech stack for primary care, has launched with a funding round of $6 million from former Athenahealth CEO Jonathan Bush, SkyFlow CEO Anshu Sharma, Saama Technologies CEO Vivek Sharma along with Anand Chandrasekharan from General Catalyst, Mohanjit Jolly from Iron Pillar, Gokul Rajaram from Firebolt Ventures, and more.
Primary care physicians (PCP) spend an average of 36 minutes on administrative work per patient, about double the amount of time as the average 18-minute visit. These workflow inefficiencies have led to burnout which almost 80% of PCPs say they are experiencing, contributing to the nationwide PCP shortage. Fold Health is providing intelligent automations to improve patient engagement and reduce repetitive administrative tasks to help primary care practices shift focus to better outcomes for patients.
Built with physicians, Fold Health has created a first-of-its-kind, all-encompassing operating system to help primary care practices supercharge existing investments in people, resources, and technology.
“The existing fragmented systems were built decades ago to enable in-person sick care, not proactive continuous and preventative care. With all of the technology now being retrofitted for the current environment, the amount of time primary care doctors spend entering the same information into different systems, has created a burden that makes it difficult to fulfill their Hippocratic oath for their patients,” said Ram Sahasranam, Co-Founder of Fold Health.
“As a virtual-first primary care startup focused on the underserved, we recognize that the one-size-fits-all models of healthcare don’t work for everyone. The same can be said about the technology that powers much of this archaic industry. Fold Health enables our team to bring a customer-obsessed experience to our patients and providers on day one” said Erik Cardenas, CEO at Zócalo Health.
Fold Health’s modular operating system can be layered on top of existing EHRs, member management systems, billing platforms, and more, to allow for one seamless experience that may reduce admin time by 60%.
“As a direct primary care physician, I have first-hand experience with the problems Fold Health aims to solve, which is why I have been working hand-in-hand with the founders to ensure that the pain points I have on the backend of my practice, which come from cobbling together various point solutions, are alleviated with the addition of the platform, which folds together my existing systems into one easy-to-use interface,” said Dr. Ben Aiken, family physician at Lantern Health and VP of Health at Decent.
“Our experience building Praxify gave us insight into the paramount gaps affecting the healthcare industry. The lack of efficient and sustainable processes continues to serve as a substantial hurdle, especially within primary care,” said Abhijit Gupta Co-Founder and CEO of Fold Health. After in-depth discussions with PCPs and executives at digital health providers like One Medical, Iora Health, and Amazon Care, we realized that there’s a clear need for a modern, purpose built toolset to provide the consumer-focused experiences Americans are used to from other large industries like banking or travel.”
