DexCare CEO Derek Streat thinks the healthcare industry is at a crossroads. In his view, health systems that are slow to meet patients’ demands for immediate and convenient care access are setting themselves up for failure.

His company — which was incubated for five years at Providence and spun out in 2021 — gives health systems a platform that helps them coordinate and manage digital care services so they can better address the needs of the modern healthcare consumer. On Wednesday, the Seattle-based startup closed a $75 million Series C funding round led by ICONIQ Growth, which brought its total funding to date to $146 million.

“The emergence of alternative care — spurred on by big tech companies – has created an all-out sprint to capture a new generation of consumers,” Streat said in a recent interview. “With DexCare, health systems can manage the logistics of digital care delivery.”

DexCare’s platform aims to break down data vaults and silos by ingesting complex datasets about things like capacity, revenue and patient demand for digital health services. In other words, the software unifies disparate data across legacy tech stacks and analyzes it to tell health systems how they should deliver digital care. The platform’s recommendations include which type of specialists are best-suited for patient needs, which clinicians are available to see patients and how many nurses should be on-call for virtual appointments.

The platform is designed to help health systems better balance their limited resources with the real-time demand for care, Streat explained. To do this, DexCare uses predictive data models to forecast demand, monitor workforce utilization and guide patients to the best avenues of care. When a patient wants to schedule an appointment, the platform shepherds them to providers that are best suited to manage their health needs. For example, the platform analyzes patients’ symptoms and connects them to providers that have high Net Promoter Scores for treating their condition. 

Many emergency rooms across the country are overflowing, and the healthcare industry has reached dangerous levels of physician and nurse burnout, Streat pointed out. He said these crises make DexCare’s workforce optimization capabilities all the more important.

“Health systems use our platform to track and orchestrate the allocation of care — across physicians, nurses, services and modalities — to ensure patients are matched to the right provider at the right time in the right setting. The result? Health systems regain cost controls for growth, can work to alleviate workforce pressures and can intelligently navigate consumers to best-fit, high-quality care options,” Streat declared.

DexCare’s platform also addresses’ patients’ demands for convenience and more choice, he added. The software allows users to make appointments and receive follow-up care based on their needs, preferences and location. On the platform, patients can schedule various types of care, including virtual, in-person or in-home. Users can also attend telehealth visits through the platform via DexCare’s own telemedicine application.

DexCare’s target customers are large, regional and multi-state health systems. Some of its customers include Providence, Kaiser Permanente, Mass General Brigham, Community Health Network and Texas Health Resources.

While there are virtual clinics like PlushCare and 98point6 on the market, Streak contends that DexCare is a “sector-defining” startup.

“While there are competitors solely focused on patient scheduling or care orchestration, we uniquely do both by operating at the intersection of access and demand. DexCare delivers the data intelligence to address both sides of the healthcare equation by meeting the variable demand for care by balancing limited system capacity,” he declared.

Photo: ValeryBrozhinsky, Getty Images