Advocate Aurora Enterprises, the investment arm of Milwaukee and Downers Grove, Illinois-based Advocate Aurora Health, recently led a $24 million funding round for Seattle-based digital health company
Xealth.
Xealth, which offers an integrated digital ordering and analytics platform that allows clinicians to order digital health content, apps and services, announced Tuesday it secured its Series B funding from the Advocate Aurora subsidiary and seven other health systems. The latest round brings Xealth's total funding to $52.6 million.
“The future of health care is using innovative technology to help people take control of their health beyond traditional care settings,” said Advocate Aurora Enterprises president Scott Powder. “That’s why we invested in Xealth. The company’s focus on connecting a broad array of health solutions to the consumer aligns with ours, as we seek to invest in industry pioneers who are helping people live well at all stages of life.”
The digital health company spun out of Providence St. Joseph Health in 2017. Froedtert & the Medical College of Wisconsin health network is among its early investors, along with Atrium Health, Cleveland Clinic, MemorialCare Innovation Fund, Providence and UPMC.
The Xealth platform allows clinicians to find and order digital health tools and programs for patients from the electronic health record workflow, send digital health orders to a patient’s email and monitor activity. It is currently used by more than 100,000 physicians, including some in the Advocate Aurora health system.
Powder said Advocate Aurora representatives found the idea behind Xealth's platform "incredibly compelling" when they first met with the then-young startup's team three years ago.
"There's a growing universe of consumer health and digital health applications and products and services, and there’s really no mechanism to make it easy for clinicians, whether physicians or nurses or others, to connect their patients to those digital and consumer health applications and products and services the way there is for prescription drugs," Powder said. "... Xealth set out to create that infrastructure."
Xealth is the third investment for Advocate Aurora Enterprises, which launched earlier this year. Other investments included
Senior Helpers, a Maryland-based provider of in-home senior care, and
Foodsmart, a San Francisco-based telenutrition platform.
Investing in the digital health platform complements Advocate Aurora's other investments, as it provides a more streamlined way for the health system's physicians to prescribe those consumer health products to patients.
For example, the Xealth platform could prompt a physician with the EHR to recommend a patient try Foodsmart as a tool to help them manage their weight. Following their visit, the patient would then be prompted in their patient portal to enroll in Foodsmart.
"This is a tool that will make it much easier to connect needed health solutions to individuals via their provider," Powder said.
Funding from the Series B round will allow Xealth to roughly double its team and enhance its intelligence engine to better help health systems determine which tools are working best with which patients, the company said.
In addition to Advocate Aurora Enterprises, investors in the latest funding round included Banner Health, ChristianaCare, Cone Health, Memorial Hermann, Nebraska Medicine, Novant Health and Stanford Health Care.
“Digital health use is accelerating and can be a key driver of growth for hospital systems,” said Mike McSherry, chief executive officer and co-founder of Xealth. “The support from leading health systems, including Advocate Aurora, as well as The Health Management Academy, validates our approach to incorporating digital health in ways that empower both providers and patients and will elevate our growth, taking our technology vision to the next level and creating a personalized care experience that deepens the connection between patients and clinical care teams.”
