Verato Secures $10 Million Investment 

Verato, Inc, a provider of cloud-based patient matching and master patient index technology, recently announced that it has raised $10 million in Series C financing. The round was led by existing investors Bessemer Venture Partners and Columbia Capital with participation from Blue Heron Capital and California Health Care Foundation. The funding will be used to accelerate the adoption of Verato's revolutionary new technology by all segments within health care—providers, health plans, health care services firms, and health care technology companies. 

Patient matching is the process by which health data is accurately linked and attributed to the correct patient. This allows physicians, care managers, claims processors, and ACOs to have a complete picture of the patient and ultimately to care for patients with maximum success, efficiency, and safety. Duplicate records are the result of poor patient matching and cause many different personas for a patient throughout the health system—and none of them provide the full picture of a patient's health history. On average, 18% of a health system's records are duplicates, meaning almost one in five patients do not have a complete medical record—and that number degrades to half of patients when trying to assemble a composite record between health systems during information exchange. Duplicate records cause a third of claims denials, costing health systems $1.5 million annually, in addition to costing roughly $2,000 per inpatient stay. Duplicate records also drastically increase patient safety issues and add significant costs to health care due to redundant testing and procedures. 

The funding caps another year of significant growth for Verato, which acquired 20 new customers in 2018. With the addition of these customers, Verato is now enabling more accurate and complete health information for leading providers, health plans, and health information exchanges which care for over 100 million patients across the United States. 

"This investment is an exciting next step for the company and a strong endorsement of the market need for a next-generation technology to solve the patient matching problem," says Mark LaRow, CEO of Verato. "Existing patient matching technology has not changed for almost a decade and is the root of the duplicate record crisis that is drastically affecting care quality, patient safety, and health care costs. We cannot continue with business as usual. It's not good medicine for patients and it makes health care unnecessarily inefficient. With Verato, a new solution finally exists, and this funding will help us ensure we solve this problem in health care once and for all." 

— Source: Verato