Every patient has questions about their health or treatment, but care teams don’t have the capacity to be available around the clock — it’s a well-known fact that the healthcare workforce is stretched across large patient populations and experiencing burnout at unprecedented rates.

Memora Health’s digital health platform was created to address this problem, and on Tuesday, the San Francisco-based company announced the close of a $30 million funding round.

The round was led by General Catalyst and included investments from Northwell Holdings, NorthShore – Edward-Elmhurst Health, Andreessen Horowitz, Transformation Capital and Frist Cressey Ventures. The financing round brings Memora’s total funding to date to $80.5 million. 

The company was founded in 2017 out of Harvard Innovation Labs and Y Combinator to address the massive patient communication challenges and care navigation gaps that exist in the current healthcare system, said Manav Sevak, Memora’s CEO and co-founder, in a recent interview.

Memora works with healthcare providers to understand how they manage a complex patient. The startup takes the provider’s workflow and digitizes it into automated touch points — such as reminders, digital screenings, educational information and follow-up visits — through text messaging with the patient.

Instead of patients “getting a 40-page booklet” on how to best care for themselves, they can get nudges at the right time to understand how they’re feeling, Sevak explained. This way, only the most urgent concerns get elevated to care teams.

Memora’s platform eliminates “the mundane tasks that keep healthcare providers shackled to their computer screens” by handling patient symptom triage, treatment guidance and education, Sevak said. 

Automating touch points can ease clinician burnout, as well as free up care teams so they can focus on the patients who need them the most, Sevak argued. About 60-70% of healthcare workflows can be digitized or systemized, he added.

“We help healthcare organizations reduce burnout and improve productivity by enabling them to use their clinical resources more effectively to right-size care. This also modernizes how they manage their patients and supports a new way of meeting patients where they are,” Sevak declared.

Memora’s texting-based programs are tailored to the patient’s situation, whether they are preparing for surgery, managing a cancer diagnosis or just gave birth to a baby. 

Insights from Memora’s text messaging conversations get integrated into the electronic health record so that care teams can access them. Clinicians can see message histories and jump seamlessly into the conversation with the patient to coordinate care if needed, Sevak explained.

Memora sells its product mainly to health systems, but the company is also “exploring opportunities” with health plans and digital health companies, he stated. Some of Memora’s health system customers include Mayo Clinic, Penn Medicine, Northwell Health, Boston Medical Center, Moffitt Cancer Center, Virtua Health and NorthShore – Edward-Elmhurst Health.

“Our initial underlying thesis for building Memora was the idea that as more and more practices and health systems moved care outside the hospital … they struggled to make this transition effectively. It’s simply a different mechanism of doing business. In addition, we have seen many health systems struggle with the lack of cohesion from one billing solution to another for patient monitoring, another for patient communication, and so on,” Sevak said.

But Memora isn’t the only digital health platform that offers text messaging services for patient engagement — there’s also companies like Conversa Health and Twistle.

Sevak thinks Memora sets itself apart from the competition because its platform is a “true enterprise solution” with several different programs, including ones for surgical care, chronic condition management and maternal care.

“For health systems looking to consolidate their investments, Memora’s breadth and scalability have really differentiated us from point solutions that focus on a single clinical area or experience,” he said.

Photo: yongyuan, Getty Images