Healthcare price-transparency platform Turquoise Well being has raised $20 million in Sequence A funding. The spherical was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from Bessemer, Field Group and Tiger World.
WHAT IT DOES
Turquoise presents a platform the place sufferers can search companies and suppliers for price data, examine money costs and enter insurance coverage data to search out out-of-pocket prices. The corporate receives its knowledge from machine-readable recordsdata posted by hospitals to remain in compliance with CMS’ Hospital Value Transparency Rule, which went into impact in January 2021.
The corporate additionally gives compliance instruments for hospitals, service bundling software program, market fee knowledge, a pricing API for different corporations to make use of of their apps, and a Medicare pricing engine.
Alongside the Sequence A, Turquoise introduced a brand new product, dubbed Clear Contracts. Its purpose is to simplify the direct-contracting course of between suppliers and payers. The platform makes use of the corporate’s pricing knowledge and boilerplate contracts, so events can extra shortly shuttle on acceptable charges.
“We’re dedicated to a imaginative and prescient of the brand new ‘pre-revenue cycle’ the place sufferers and payers know the prices upfront and suppliers turn out to be accustomed to real-time fee for shoppable companies,” cofounder and CEO Chris Severn stated in a press release.
“By making a clear, easy-to-use direct contracting platform, Turquoise Well being is shifting the trade’s focus in direction of full monetary certainty previous to care in the end leading to much less friction between sufferers, suppliers and payers.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
Many hospitals nonetheless aren’t in full compliance with the federal worth transparency guidelines. In line with a February survey from patientrightsadvocate.org, solely 14.3% of 1,000 hospitals had been absolutely following the principles.
About 38% of the hospitals included within the survey posted sufficient negotiated charges, however greater than half weren’t compliant in different elements of the rule, like charges by every insurer and named plan. These outcomes had been consistent with earlier research discovering many hospitals weren’t absolutely compliant.
Different tech-enabled corporations that purpose to extend worth transparency in healthcare embrace CashMD, which launched its price device in 2019, and ‘self-pay’ insurtech Sidecar Well being, which raised $125 million in Sequence C funding in January 2021.
