Before founding San Francisco-based NexHealth in 2017, Alamin Uddin was working as a medical receptionist while he was a pre-med student in New York. It was there that the company’s CEO saw firsthand how the patient experience differs markedly from the typical consumer experience outside of healthcare. In particular, he witnessed the inefficiencies and technical barriers medical practices face with patient management, according to the company.

Since then, Uddin has been laser-focused on improving and streamlining the patient experience, and NexHealth now has $125 million more in funding to do just that. The company announced the haul from its Series C round Thursday. The latest investment increased NexHealth’s valuation to $1 billion.

The funding round was led by Buckley Ventures, with angel investors Lachy Groom, Jack Altman,  Scott Belsky, Shreyas Doshi, Eric Glyman, Shahed Khan, Packy McCormick and Rahul Vohra also participating.

NexHealth is planning to use the funds to grow its team and build new features that are integrated into the EHR to streamline and improve the patient experience, like one-click appointment booking.

In a phone call Friday, Uddin noted that everything he does in is daily life as a consumer outside of healthcare is frictionless, digitized and seamless. But it’s still commonplace for people to have to deal with friction as a patient, he said— like having to call to get an appointment and dealing with billing issues afterward.

“These are problems we all experience in the healthcare system, and we all know of, but there isn’t a lot of innovation happening to solve those problems,” Uddin said.

With its patient experience platform for patients, doctors and developers, NexHealth is aiming to address those issues. It serves a number of different types of practices including dental, dermatology and primary care.

NexHealth is one of a range of digital health companies focused on improving the patient experience, as well as streamlining the workflow for providers. Others include 1upHealth and Jellyfish Health.

One way NexHealth is trying to support innovation is by improving interoperability between EHRs.

NexHealth’s Universal API integrates healthcare data from many EHR systems to break down the data silos that have traditionally slowed the pace of health tech innovation, according to the company. It’s partnered with a range of health tech companies including Quip, Swell and SmileDirectClub to enable their developers to build and deploy new products faster for patients and doctors, the company said.

The company is also putting a lot of its focus and funding into attracting new talent into health tech, Uddin said.

He sees the latest investment as proof that what NexHealth is doing is working.

“It’s validation in terms of our product works, customers are happy, investors are pouring more capital into it—so that we know we can distribute the solution to as many customers as possible,” Uddin said.

Over the last year, the company has expanded its customer base to include Mid-Atlantic Dental Partners, Coast Dental and Jefferson Dental, and it now manages 68 million patient records.

Photo: sdecoret, Getty Images