Altheia

Picture this: A patient walks into your clinic, but your view of their health history is a patchwork assembled from five health providers. Critical test results are buried in attachments. It's challenging to assemble a complete picture. You're left playing medical detective with incomplete clues, and you only have so much time before your next appointment.

We're still fighting the same battle despite HIPAA, the HITECH Act, and decades of healthcare digitization. EHR vendors have turned patient data into competitive moats, leaving clinicians to piece together fragmented health stories like Indiana Jones consulting scraps of a tattered treasure map.

The challenge and rush cause mistakes and misunderstandings. Imagine how many patients experience duplicated tests because a new provider didn’t see or couldn't interpret a test from another provider. Imagine the costs and complications that might result.

Altheia, Inc., founded by Jolly Nanda, MBA, and Barb Hayes, seeks to establish a new foundation for sharing, presenting, and processing patient health data. Our current EHR systems are shaped by history, regulation, and competitive moat building. Altheia has designed a system to benefit all stakeholders, including patients, clinicians, researchers, and payers. They intend to provide streamlined user experiences tailored to each stakeholder’s workflow.

For instance, their clinician interface shows a chronological medical history with a standardized format. Patients can discover relevant research studies and opt-in to share their data. Everyone can spend less time managing prior authorizations.

On top of that foundation, Altheia has built five Machine Learning (ML) models that assign risk scores for chronic diseases like diabetes based on medical histories. Jolly is also developing models to detect rare diseases earlier. Counterintuitively, the NIH estimates that 25 to 30 million people in the US suffer from rare diseases, which have tremendous economic costs. Imagine how treatment and patient outcomes might improve by applying predictive models to a broad patient population.

Altheia is raising a $1.7 million pre-seed round and expects to onboard its first paying customer within weeks.

Disclosure: I do not have a financial relationship with Altheia; the image is AI-generated and not representative of their software.