HiLabs, a company that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to clean messy data, announced on Thursday that it secured $39 million in Series B funding.
Based in Bethesda, Maryland, HiLabs was established in 2014 and focuses mainly on assisting health insurers. Their MCheck platform, which operates on the cloud, tidies up healthcare data to cut down on costs and enhance patient outcomes. They offer various products targeting provider data accuracy, clinical results, payment precision, and value-based care. Dirty data poses a significant problem, costing the healthcare sector over $300 billion each year, as per Amit Garg, CEO and co-founder of HiLabs.
Garg explained via email, “By having cleaner data, health insurers not only save money and improve member satisfaction but also address numerous patient challenges, such as improving provider directory accuracy, reducing surprise billing, and offering more targeted care management to enhance health outcomes.”
Denali Growth Partners and Eight Roads Ventures led the Series B funding, with F-Prime Capital also participating. This brings HiLabs’ total funding to around $41 million.
Jesse Lane, founder and managing member of Denali Growth Partners, highlighted HiLabs’ real-world impact with AI, particularly in cleansing data for top health payers, although HiLabs did not disclose the names of these payers.
The company intends to use the funds to expand its provider solution to more health insurers and enhance its clinical solution, as stated by Garg. He added, “We aim to improve our provider product by adding features to assist health insurers in understanding provider contracts better and directly connecting with providers to improve the quality of provider directories. Additionally, we plan to enhance our clinical data product to help health plans process and standardize unstructured clinical data, such as physician notes, for enriching their clinical data platforms.”
HiLabs’ fundraising announcement coincides with regulatory changes facing health plans, such as the Requiring Enhanced and Accurate Lists of Health Providers Act introduced by three senators to bolster requirements for insurers in maintaining accurate provider directories.
While AI has been rapidly advancing in the healthcare industry, Garg pointed out that there are still concerns about its efficacy. He stated, “There has been little evidence of such technologies providing actual benefits to date. We suspect this may be due to dirty healthcare data feeding into these models, which can then produce incorrect information. This can severely impact trust in AI in the healthcare sector, which is crucial when lives are at stake. In contrast, HiLabs has demonstrated tangible benefits from applying advanced AI to address the data quality issue in healthcare.”
Source: Medcitynews
