Akido Labs is a healthcare startup that has redirected its growth strategy through a partnership with Pomona-based Chaparral Medical Group.
The partnership takes Akido’s proprietary technology platform, which the company calls Health Graph, and makes it usable across the medical network.
The platform is a software technology that predicts social or health outcomes that a person may be susceptible to based on their medical history and life events, classified as factors by Akido. Social determinants of health. It also meets the needs of patients with pre-existing chronic conditions who visit a specialist on a regular basis.
Chief Technology Officer Jared Goodner provided an example of using the platform.
“As a patient, I may have lost my job recently, which I casually mentioned to my doctor. Since our system is trained to identify markers, especially social determinants that indicate the possibility of disease progression, our system flags job loss ,” said Goodner. “And this results in an automatic sequence of events being triggered based on that (tick).”
The software can also suggest additional screenings around signs of pre-diabetes, notify that doctor and patient discuss a food insecurity, or submit an application for a nutrition program. care for the patient. Goodner added that the platform is designed to assist doctors in their services, not make decisions for patients.
“You are democratizing the ability to prevent aggravation by exposing (patients) to a much larger market opportunity for interventions, some of which can be created and administered by Akido and other opportunities are purely third-party, says Prashant Samant, Akido’s chief executive officer.
Through its technology, the company has penetrated the market for preventive care, rather than immediate care for patient conditions that have become reality.
Akido’s partnership with Chaparral Medical Group, which has more than 30 locations in the Pomona Valley, allows the company to bring in more users of its technology and, therefore, more income. It also marks Akido’s transformation from a software vendor for various healthcare customers to a genuine healthcare provider powered by its own technology.
“(Chapparal has) a culture geared towards chronic disease management, and we can enhance that with our technology platform and infrastructure,” said Samant.
Under the partnership, Dr. Prasad Jeereddi, founder of Chaparral, will continue the operation of his team’s day-to-day medical functions and assume the role of Akido’s medical director. He will work closely with Akido’s Business Development Manager, Sanjit Mahanti.
Mahanti says Chaparral is a good fit for Akido’s business because of its focus on treating chronic illness in a multi-disciplinary way, which he describes as the best way to create a long-term healthcare business.
Core competencies
“We’re talking endocrinologists, rheumatologists, vascular surgeons, and cardiologists, which are really core subspecialties that we’re seeing as most important for chronic disease care. ,” said Mahanti. “We wanted to make sure we were working with an organization that had that core competency.”
Jeereddi and Mahanti share more than 50 years of knowledge and experience operating in the multi-specialty care sector and will be key players in Akido’s expansion into new markets.
“I have always believed that patient care is as much an art as it is a science, and that Akido’s consideration of creating a symbiotic relationship between medical practice, art and technology will greatly serve the patient. our patients, our doctors, our care team and our community,” Jeereddi said.
This partnership comes seven years after Akido was founded from the University of Southern California’s D-Health Medical Laboratory, around the time the company received an early investment from Y Combinator, a company Accelerate technology startups.
Between then and the development of the new medical network, the company primarily provides its services to entities that need help managing healthcare services. For example, Akido has used its platform to work with the city of Long Beach, the city of Santa Monica, the Moffitt Cancer Center and the American Foundation for the Blind, among others.
In the case of Long Beach, Akido has provided its platform to help the city coordinate care across a variety of social and health-oriented services.
“Places like Bai Dai suit populations with very different needs from a cultural point of view, right? It’s a very multicultural city,” said Mahanti. “That means that as a physician, care provider or social worker, providing support to meet the cultural needs of any particular individual can be quite challenging. useful and so we put a lot of effort into designing the system to make that possible.”
Last year, the company announced that it had raised a total of $25 million in funding to expand its influence, and their latest funding at the time was Future Crowd Capital.
Akido used to follow an enterprise software business model, but with the transition to a healthcare business model, the company has generated revenue through patient care. That revenue is a combination of fee-for-service and capitation care. According to the American Academy of Family Physicians, limited care “is a payment arrangement for health care services in which an organization receives a risk-adjusted sum per person. allocated to them, each time period, regardless of the volume of services the person seeks. “
With its own medical network, Akido is now looking to delve even further into the field of preventive care. Samant says the company’s biggest challenge to date has been to validate its presence in the space.
“It requires a lot of validation from other parts of the business ecosystem, from insurance companies and government agencies to healthcare providers looking to work with,” says Saman. we. “Like, ‘can you guys really take charge of the rock here? Or, are you just Silicon Valley folks going to throw stones at software? ‘”
According to Saman, Akido is planning to increase its financing by 150% to 200% next year, mainly because the business will come from the partnership with Chaparral.
