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November 08, 2022 : Carta Healthcare, a San Francisco-based provider of clinical data management solutions, closed a $20 million Series B financing round on Wednesday, bringing its total funding to date to $37 million.
Participants in the funding round include Mass General Brigham, American College of Cardiology, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Asset Management Ventures, Maverick Ventures Investment Fund, Frist Cressey Ventures, Paramark Ventures, and Storm Ventures.
Founded in 2017, Carta’s mission is to reduce the number of time clinicians spend on mundane administrative tasks. Research made public this year in JAMA Internal Medicine revealed that U.S. physicians spend an average of nearly 2 hours each day completing documentation outside work hours.
To address this problem, Carta offers three main products — Atlas, Navigator, and Semaphore. These products are all powered by Cartographer, Carta’s analytics platform that interprets and standardizes patient data.
Carta’s flagship product, Atlas, is an AI-powered data abstraction tool that hospitals use to submit patient data to clinical registries.
“Our technology uses AI to watch an abstractor do their work, and it replicates what they do like a monkey,” Matt Hollingsworth, Carta’s CEO and co-founder said in an interview. “The nice thing about that is that it can conserve time after that process has played out.”
Hospitals often employ dozens of nurses whose primary role is filling out forms for clinician registries, and he pointed out. According to Hollingsworth, Atlas reduces the amount of time that nurses and doctors spend on these forms while still maintaining accuracy.
He declared that a huge motivation for this accuracy is that Carta uses both clinicians and AI to complete records — the company’s AI can fill out most sections, but some require verification from a clinician.
“Learning from data abstractors works, but trying to replace them entirely does not,” Hollingsworth expressed. “The primary thing that our derivative does is amplify productivity, rather than try to remove the human from the equation — you cannot remove the human from the equation and still get good quality results.”
In addition to Atlas, Carta sells Navigator, an insights tool that analyzes a healthcare organization’s data to produce recommendations on enhancing operational workflows. The company also presented Semaphore in September — this product is a development platform that healthcare institutions can use to create their data science tools and AI models.
With its influx of new funds, Carta will boost sales and marketing efforts, hoping to expand its consumer base. Hollingsworth said the company’s technology is currently used at 245 hospitals across 18 health systems, including Stanford Health Care, CommonSpirit Health, Mass General Brigham, and UCSF Health.
Though the company has its eyes set on expansion, Carta is one of many providers of clinical data management technology. Take Q-Centrix, for instance — the Chicago-based business has been providing clinical data management products since 2010. But companies like Q-Centrix are only competitors for Carta’s Atlas product, according to Hollingsworth. He expressed Carta sets itself apart by maintaining a diversified product portfolio.
Hollingsworth pointed out that hospitals can utilize Carta’s technology to automate data abstraction and eliminate operational inefficiencies. For instance, he said that Stanford Health Care used the company’s technology to pinpoint the number of surgical supplies it required in the operating room and saved $4 million.
