Acupera Achieves $6 Million in Funding to Expand Development of Patient Care Management Platform

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SAN FRANCISCO— (November 14, 2013)

Acupera today announced it secured $2 million in bridge financing from The Whittemore Collectin, Ltd  to fund the development of its Population Health and Care Coordination Workflow Management technology. Acupera’s solution is designed to maximize patient care effectiveness and efficiency within healthcare organizations. The $2 million is in addition to $4 million previously secured in Series A funding from Whittemore Collection, Ltd, and Liebkind, LLC, which supported the initial development of Acupera’s patient care management platform. Acupera is a privately held technology company, launched in 2011.

“Acupera enables real-time, cloud-based Patient risk stratification, and clinical and behavioral workflow management that enables health care organizations to meet the diverse medical and psycho-social needs of their patient communities,” said Dr. Ronald Razmi, CEO of Acupera. “Our technology is designed to easily integrate within existing provider workflows, identify patient-critical needs and rally just the right resources to ensure patient care needs are anticipated and met.”

Acupera’s care management platform effectively mines existing electronic medical records to elevate the most important data relevant to improving overall population health. With its patient- and user-friendly interface, Acupera is uniquely suited not only to meet the evolving needs of care management teams, but also to engage local patient populations in self-care.

“Acupera is the next step in digital health revolution and begins to make the clinical data actionable,” said George Landegger, Managing Director, The Whittemore Collection, Ltd. “Acupera is the only solution available today that is suited to address the evolving requirements of growing healthcare organizations” Said Hermann Buerger, Managing Director, Liebkind, LLC.

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How Did We Get Here? Part II

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Part II

So, now everyone is living longer thanks to improved quality of life and better medicines. That’s a good thing, right? Well, yes and no. Longer life expectancy and more active life means higher productivity, thus higher GDP and a bigger economy that can employ more people and creates more tax revenues for governments. That’s good but it’s not the whole story. Since the new treatments began to outstrip the ability of most people to pay for them, around the middle of the twentieth century, most developed nation governments began to provide health insurance for some or most of their population. It started out as insurance for the elderly and the poor, and in many countries it soon became government-sponsored universal insurance. Although universal coverage is not the case in the United States yet, starting in the sixties, US government signed a contract with people over sixty five and guaranteed healthcare to all over that age. At the time, it was projected that this group would constitute only three percent of the population. Smart government statisticians said that the government would be able to honor this contract long-term. Well, fast forward some fifty years and now we find ourselves in an entirely different situation. The percentage of people over sixty five is far above the initial projected three percentage, and rising fast. Life Science companies are developing biologics, expensive devices, and much more. Medical costs have been rising at a much faster rate than the GDP and suddenly the government is trying to figure out how to honor their contracts with their people. The cost of medical care is taking an ever increasing percentage of government budgets and is leaving less and less to invest in education, infrastructure, and technology (which is how you grow the economy!)

So, what are they going to do? Well, we will discuss that next.

How Did We Get Here: Part I

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Part I

With all of the talk of healthcare reform and very turbulent launch of Health Insurance Exchanges, it’s time to step back and ask: How did we get here?
Today’s debate about how people should be insured and how healthcare should be provided is the result of historic trends that are intersecting at this moment in time. It wasn’t too long ago that treatment options were very limited for just about any ailment and life expectancy was less than sixty years old. Governments had no involvement in provision of healthcare to their populations and the concept of insurance as a way to pay for healthcare was unheard of. What happened? Well, many things. First, industrial revolution resulted in great wealth creation and ability to invest in research and development in many areas, including Medicine. At the turn of the twentieth century, the top causes of mortality were almost all infectious diseases. Cardiovascular disease was not in the top 10 causes of mortality worldwide. Why? People have to live long enough to develop cardiovascular disease and many people died with infectious disease or in wars. With the discovery of penicillin and the subsequent creation of the pharmaceutical industry, improvements in sanitation, and anesthesia and surgery, suddenly many of the universally fatal illnesses became treatable. People were now living longer and developing new illnesses, which meant opportunities for new research to discover new drugs to combat these illnesses. Heard of statins? How about ace inhibitors? These two classes of drugs are responsible for improving survival rates of two of the deadliest chronic diseases. So, now people are living longer and new, exotic treatments are coming out everyday to take care of their arthritis, alzheimer’s, and bad knees.

Wait a minute! Who is paying for all of this? That’ll be the focus of part II