critical careFounder and CEO Lyle Berkowitz said the Chicago- and Madison-based startup is looking to address healthcare by proving that the country does not have a shortage of doctors, but “a lack of effective use of them.” acquisition problem.
On Wednesday, the company Announce It has closed a $24 million Series A round led by 8VC, LRV Health, bold capitaland Spectrum Health Ventures.
Founded in 2021, KeyCare is the only virtual priority care platform in the US built with Epic. The startup acts as a virtual care marketplace, connecting health systems with virtual care teams working on its Epic-based platform. Berkowitz said he started the company to help health systems provide a more consistent experience for patients through two-way data sharing.
“The problem we found was that health systems wanted and needed to provide more virtual care, but their in-house providers were overwhelmed and their options for partners were limited to third-party providers using less integrated technology ,” Berkowitz said. “The result is that they either fail to meet the patient’s need for care or take the patient into a discontinuous experience that doesn’t share data.”
On KeyCare’s platform, patients can book appointments with virtual care clinicians, which the company calls “virtual doctors,” through their health system’s MyChart portal. These virtual people can access a patient’s comprehensive health record and record visits in Epic. After the appointment is complete, the patient’s information flows back to their health system.
According to Berkowitz, the most common initial use case for KeyCare is to provide virtual urgent care visits available 24/7 in all 50 states.
“A lot of health systems are asking us to immediately provide state services that they can’t do on their own because of licensing issues, and then do night shifts because it’s very difficult or expensive for them to do it themselves,” he said.
Berkowitz added that many health systems also recognize that it often makes sense to let employees focus on complex care that must be done in person and partner with other companies for more routine care than virtualized.
KeyCare’s customers are Epic-based health systems looking to expand the breadth and scope of their virtual care, one in Michigan Spectrum Health. The startup’s revenue comes from health system fees and access-based revenue.
While other virtual priority care platforms exist, such as Tradock, Babylon Health and Daejeon HealthKeyCare is the only one built on top of Epic’s EHR, which Epic has largest share EHR deployments on the market. According to Berkowitz, this gives the company two advantages.
“First, it means we have a full-stack, meaningful-use certified EHR that can be optimized for a variety of virtual care scenarios, including primary care, specialty care, and remote patient monitoring,” he said. “Second, Epic has incredible interoperability capabilities that allow us to share patient data and appointment scheduling between Epic instances and our health system partners.”
These advantages also benefit patients, Berkowitz added. For example, patients can stay on the Epic system throughout their visit without having to create a new username or enter their past medical history.
To meet the demand for virtual care services in large health systems, KeyCare will use its Series A funding to expand its team, go live in more health systems and partner with more virtual care groups. It will also eventually expand its services to include comprehensive primary care support and various specialty areas — it currently only offers urgent care and behavioral health care.
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