Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Zipnosis, which offers whitelabeled telemedicine tools to providers, quietly raised a $3 million funding round last week. The raise came from existing investors. The company’s last round, in January 2016, was supported by Safeguard Scientifics, Ascension Ventures, Fairview Health Services, Hyde Park Venture Partners, Arthur Ventures, Waterline Ventures and Omphalos Ventures. This brings the company’s total funding to $23 million.

“As an organization focused on sustainable, organic growth, we were very intentional about the size of our Series B,” Zipnosis CEO Jon Pearce said in a statement. “In this industry, you hear about huge amounts of cash being splashed around. Zipnosis didn’t require a massive infusion of investment to achieve our growth objectives. It was more important for us to take precisely what we needed to move to the next level – no more and no less.”

In the lead up to HIMSS18, Pearce spoke to MobiHealthNews about his company’s strategy. Whereas many large telemedicine companies are offering services via health insurers or direct to consumer, Zipnosis continues to focus on enabling providers to launch their own telemedicine services. Read more.

Minneapolis healthtech venture Zipnosis has raised $3m in new convertible capital investment according to CFO Eric Bosler.

Zipnosis was established in 2008 by CEO Jon Pearce to offer economical online diagnosis and prescription services for minor health ailments, defining telehealth in the early days.

While they started as a direct to consumer model and began scaling with that approach, the company shifted the product into a true B2B SaaS solution by 2013 and began partnering with a variety of nationwide medical providers who wanted to offer the virtual visit option directly to their own patients.

“We believe that every health system and care provider in the country must have a digital front door and offer virtual care,” Bosler says of the company’s ongoing operating thesis.

After years of heads down business building, the big boom came for Zipnosis in 2016 via $17m investment round in December 2015 led by Safeguard Scientifics of Pennsylvania, with funding also from Ascension Ventures (MO), a subsidiary of the nation’s largest Catholic health care system. Hyde Park Venture Partners (IL), Arthur Ventures (MN), Waterline Ventures (MA) and Omphalos Venture Partners (MN) also participated in that round. Read more.

Over the past ten years or so, telemedicine has taken off.

A recent report says the telemedicine market will be worth $113.1 billion by 2025¹, and there are many similar reports predicting its global market value, surveys and studies compiling and analyzing provider and patient attitudes toward it, and countless articles discussing how telemedicine is truly the future of care delivery. But is it?

To answer that question, I’d like to look at an unlikely parallel: consumer banking. Back in the 90s, the transition of standard, in-person banking activities to automated phone systems was a big deal. “Telebanking” was billed as the latest, disruptive technology; banking for consumers was no longer tied to the standard 9-5 bank lobby hours – it was a revolution in convenience.

If that sounds silly, it’s because you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who would willingly choose an automated phone system over the more convenient online and app-based banking available today.

Telemedicine today is much like telebanking in the 90s. Namely, it’s the first step toward transforming healthcare into a consumer-centric, convenience-first experience. But, it’s only the first step. Read more.

Pharmacies and grocery stores aren’t just for picking up medications and ingredients anymore. Patients have been utilizing retail clinics and urgent care clinics to receive care for minor conditions because it’s convenient, said Kevin L. Smith, DNP, FNP, FAANP, chief medical information officer at Zipnosis, a virtual care software and technology company. The success of these health care delivery systems is a telling sign of the new age of health care consumerism. Now, digital health options are further enabling the transformation of passive patients into savvy health care consumers. In the Closing General Session keynote address on Saturday, Dr. Smith will explore the emerging role of the connected patient amid the rapidly expanding digital and virtual health care delivery options and how they are both coming together to create a positive force of change in the health care industry. Read more.

Join MultiCare Health System and Zipnosis for an exploration of how virtual care is impacting patient acquisition. Emily Yu, Director of Retail Clinics and Virtual Health, will share the results of a study that demonstrates virtual care’s utility as a patient acquisition channel.

You will learn:

• Why patient acquisition is a useful success measure for virtual care
• How patient panel growth and market share are linked 
• The value of virtual care as a patient acquisition channel

Register now!

Tacoma, Wash.-based MultiCare Health System succeeded in increasing patient acquisitions through its telehealth program, according to an analysis by the health system and its virtual care provider Zipnosis.

MultiCare Health System and Zipnosis tapped healthcare analytics firm Carrot Health to conduct the study, which identified and followed 304 telehealth users who had not received in-person care at MultiCare Health System for at least two years prior to their remote visit on MultiCare Virtual Care — an online diagnosis and treatment service for common conditions. Read more.

The American Academy of Family Physicians (AAFP) has announced a partnership with Zipnosis, providers of virtual care technology, to provide AAFP’s 129,000 members and their patients with a comprehensive virtual care platform.

Following a 2017 AAFP member survey that showcased an increased demand for virtual care services, the partnership aims to develop a platform addressing the need for online diagnosis and treatment options. The platform will allow AAFP members to offer patients access to care with their family physician through a virtual care portal.

“Patients today want quick and easy access to health care, but that convenience shouldn’t come at the cost of the relationship they have with their family physician,” said Steven Waldren, MD, director of the AAFP’s Alliance for eHealth Innovation. “Offering this new telemedicine platform gives our family physician members another tool through which they can care for patients.” Read more.

Zipnosis has agreed to its first collaboration with medical society the American Academy of Family Physicians. AAFP has been working with the company to develop an onboarding site for small and medium-sized family physician practices and plans to offer the platform to members later this year after an initial pilot.

In a phone interview with Steven Waldren, director of the AAFP’s Alliance for eHealth Innovation, he said the collaboration with Zipnosis was the group’s first with a telemedicine company. It selected the company following an RFP process.

“Zipnosis is really thinking about the physician. They’ve thought about what physicians need on a practical level, including evidence-based medicine, guidelines to care,” Waldren said. Read more.

Jon Pearce is CEO and co-founder of digital health company Zipnosis Inc., which makes software that drives the online-care programs offered by many large health systems around the country. Pearce launched the business a decade ago and it now counts most of the Twin Cities’ major care providers among its customers.

Minneapolis-based Zipnosis closed on $17 million in venture capital about three years ago and has grown to 45 employees. Pearce sat down with the Business Journal to talk about the changing telemedicine market, how he wins customers and his biggest business mistake. The conversation was edited for length and clarity.

You majored in Russian back in college. What drew you to the language? I did Russian and computer science and I like to joke that I don’t speak Russian well or code well. I started college in 1997 and that was around the time when both China and Russia were looking like the next global power. I thought Russia would have been an interesting place to do business and fell in love with the language and the music. I have no desire to do business in Russia now.

How did you get into health care? I got to health care through technology. I had an internship at medical-software startup Provation Medical and fell in love with that. After I graduated, they had me launch a product for the orthopedics market. I was fresh out of college, knowing nothing about health care, and standing in an operating room with orthopedic surgeons thinking, “I don’t belong here.” They’d have their rock music on, sawing away at bone. I almost passed out. Provation ultimately got bought and it was really interesting, as a startup guy, to see the transition and all the expectations that come around a startup being sold.

You started out pitching Zipnosis as an online-diagnosis service to consumers. Now health care providers use your software to offer their own services. What drove the business model change? We’ve lived and died a lot of different times. We started out as MinuteClinic on the iPhone. Two things were fundamentally flawed: We were ahead of the adoption curve and we were trying to make money on every $25 visit. The patient uptake wasn’t there and the margins weren’t there. When Fairview Health Services came to us and said, “We’re looking for a platform,” we said, “Let’s go explore that.”

What went into your decision to raise venture capital? We were profitable in 2014 and had good metrics. We could have just continued to get by. But some of this is, are you going to be a Greyhound bus or a rocket ship? The market was really starting to take off. We were seeing this massive shift from the old-school telemedicine, where it’s hardware-based and outsourced — like a Teladoc — to health care providers taking this on themselves, and it becoming more software-based. That’s really where we’ve planted our flag, and the market is just racing after us.

Is the telemedicine market today over-hyped? Read more.

Via MobiHealth News:

Minneapolis, Minnesota-based Zipnosis is bucking traditional telemedicine wisdom in two ways. One, the company has always worked to deliver telemedicine services to patients by working with their existing provider. Two, they are moving away from video visit as the default for telemedicine.

“I always looked at phone and video as more of an analog model,” said Jon Pearce, CEO of Zipnosis. “I said we have to be a digital company. I love to ask people ‘When was the last time you bought something on Amazon using a video visit?’ You haven’t. The standard of convenience has been set outside of healthcare and I think what we’re trying to do is push the technology in a way that connects those patients and providers in an efficient and elegant experience.”

At HIMSS18 in Las Vegas, Zipnosis will show a new chat interface it has been piloting with Methodist Health System in North Texas. Read more.

Overcoming the Final Obstacle to Provider Adoption

By Rebecca Hafner-Fogarty, MD, Chief Medical Officer, Zipnosis
Twitter: @Zipnosis

Excerpted from remarks by Dr. Hafner-Fogarty at the C-Tel conference, December 1, 2017

Virtual care holds enormous potential to transform the healthcare landscape. Since you are here, you most likely agree that virtual care (and telemedicine) can be of great benefit for patients, providers, and health systems. In today’s digitally focused landscape, virtual care is truly on the cusp of having a dramatic, positive impact. But – and of course there’s always a but – there’s a big obstacle standing in the way: provider adoption, fueled by inconsistent virtual care reimbursement .

I’ve noticed huge disparity in statistics associated with provider adoption of “telemedicine”. For example, a KPMG survey earlier this year found that about 30% of clinician respondents were using some form of telemedicine. However, a 2016 AAFP survey showed only 15% of respondents had used telemedicine tools in the previous 12 months. Maybe most telling is that the KPMG survey listed provider reluctance as a top barrier to health systems implementing a telemedicine solution. Read more.

The trend toward healthcare consumerism increasingly is at the forefront of health system decisions. In growing numbers, patients are making healthcare choices based on the ability of providers to bring value in the form of access and experience.

This patient-focused mindset is at the heart of Methodist Medical Group’s strategic direction, and a key factor in its decision to launch a new telemedicine system aimed at fulfilling the demands of consumerism. Read more.

Over the past eight years since its startup, virtual-care company Zipnosis has continuously expanded, prompting a search for a larger and more accommodating space. Executives found it in the T3 office building, a new take on a vintage warehouse designed by Hines. Located in Minneapolis’ North Loop neighborhood, Zipnosis moved into T3 in April.

Perkins+Will designed the space with plenty of room for employees to gather together, said Jamey Berg, one of the lead interior designers on the project. A unique aspect of the new space that invites employees to interact is the main conference room that has removable glass walls, allowing for a transition from private conference area to large meeting space.

“We wanted the opportunity to host events, whether they be industry-related, discussions or forums, or just families coming together,” said Jennifer Ho, director of human resources at Zipnosis. The company recently held its first family event, allowing employees and their relatives to gather. The versatility of the central conference room was something Zipnosis did not have at its former headquarters. Read more.

September 08, 2017 – A recent study found that a mobile health platform can cause an increase in office visits and a decrease in new business. Now telehealth advocates are saying that study could actually help the industry.

Conducted by researchers at the University of Wisconsin and the University of Pennsylvania, the five-year study found that a health clinic’s telephone-based e-visit platform boosted office visits by 6 percent. This meant that providers spent more time with those patients in the office, and ultimately led to a 15 percent drop in new patients.

Telehealth advocates were quick to point out that a phone-and-e-mail-based service is just one kind of telehealth platform, and its advantages and disadvantages have been heavily debated for some time. They also say this study proves that providers need to plan carefully and integrate telehealth into the care delivery routine to make it work. Read more. 

When people ask me my Big Hairy Audacious Goal (BHAG) for Zipnosis, I reply: “To make the transactional cost of healthcare $0.00.” The looks I get range from quizzical to quizzical and concerned. After all, people are used to the current payment model and don’t see how Zipnosis will be able to stay in business without transactional revenue. Of course, this isn’t going to happen overnight – but the healthcare of the future is going to be paid for differently than it is today. Read more.

June 12, 2017 – Driven by patient demand, improvements in technology, and the need to deliver healthcare outside the traditional hospital setting, health systems across the US are embracing telemedicine.

Some are launching platforms to connect patients to specialist care, either through consults or as part of a larger care management platform targeting those with chronic conditions. Still more are using the technology to improve hospital workflows, improve clinician-to-clinician collaboration and extend services to smaller, more remote hospitals and clinics. Read more.

MINNEAPOLIS, April 20, 2017 – Leading virtual care company Zipnosis today announced a recent study that illustrates the true downstream revenue impact of virtual care as a patient acquisition channel for health systems. The study was conducted by analytics company Carrot Health, utilizing data from a large health system client of Zipnosis.

In a nod to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s estimation that 8.1 million people have diabetes but are undiagnosed, Zipnosis has set up a care coordination service with Fairview Health Services to prevent chronic conditions including diabetes,according to a news release. The virtual care platform is intended to make it possible to do a remote diagnosis of chronic conditions and speed up interventions by doctors. The collaboration fits in with plans Zipnosis CEO Jon Pearce shared with MedCity News earlier this year when the digital health company closed a $17 million Series A round.