This article was originally published on Beam.Health
For time-poor doctors running their own practice, Beam makes having an online clinic as easy as setting up an eCommerce site. Providing them with telemedicine, marketing, payment collection and clinic analytics to improve their business bottom line and modernize their patient experience.
New York, NY – May 20, 2021: Beam Health announced a $1.5 million seed funding round led by Darling Ventures and joined by MATH Ventures, Techstars, Social Starts and TechNexus. This capital raise underscores Beam Health’s product vision of equipping small private practices with the same transformative technology previously only feasible to large healthcare providers. The additional investment will allow Beam Health to accelerate plans to optimize payment collections for private practices while empowering healthcare providers with data, analytics and business insights. Together, this combination will give physicians and practice managers a condensed view of the health of their businesses, along with suggested actions to improve their bottom line while improving patient care.
Historically, technology has been adopted at a much faster rate at large hospitals and clinics compared to the smaller private practices which still employ roughly 55% of the four million healthcare providers in the US. “We see a lot of innovation happening at the hospital/health system level and emerging VC-backed health clinics, but private practices, the backbone of our healthcare system, cannot compete at the point of sale with highly optimized companies like One Medical or PlushCare,” said Sas Ponnapalli, co-founder and CEO, Beam Health.
It’s been a unique journey for Ponnapalli; at 23 years old he began his career as the founding CTO of a vertical telemedicine startup recently acquired by Accolade for $450M. “When I left Plushcare, I traveled to Bali and spent some time taking a look at the big picture in healthcare. After a few months, I saw the value in privatized care and how the vast majority of health-tech startups fail to recognize and champion that value. In many countries, many patients don’t get their choice of provider, and less have a genuine relationship with that provider. The world is fundamentally better off when care is decentralized.”
There is a large contingent who agree with Ponnapalli’s assessment of the healthcare landscape. “Physicians who run their own clinic are drawn to the autonomy and job satisfaction from practicing their own brand of medicine. But they lack the time to focus on the profitability of their business and how to keep up with the digital transformation of their industry. Beam makes it incredibly easy to run a modern profitable clinic and is bringing what Shopify did for retail owners to the private practice,” said Daniel Darling, Managing Director, Darling Ventures.
“We had the challenge of bringing our product to market during a global pandemic–a time when the entire healthcare industry had 15 years worth of evolution packed into a six-month period,” said Ranga Jayawardena, co-founder and COO of Beam Health. “After speaking with thousands of healthcare operators, it became apparent that physicians sacrifice the health of their businesses to focus on patient care. The irony here is that in the long run, this leads to innovation stagnation and practice consolidation that ultimately works against the progression of healthcare. This does not serve patients or the providers that care for them.”
Beam serves to give doctors a simple solution to gain better control over their businesses while minimizing disruption to clinics’ existing workflows. From a private medical practice’s point of view, the healthcare software industry is very fragmented and full of competing offerings that either sell standalone products with siloed capabilities (i.e. patient scheduling, electronic medical records, billing, telemedicine) or seek to offer a comprehensive solution that is difficult to integrate and has limited interoperability. There is an interesting gap in the market for such a solution for private practices that helps them execute their business goals while upgrading their online presence.
About Beam Health
Beam Health believes that private practices need access to smarter payment solutions and business analytics to thrive. Beam is the first revenue optimization platform for medical professionals and offers a connected suite of tools that includes
Point of sale system to improve patient payment collections by an average of 9%
Analytics dashboard that offers key insights and calls to action to help doctors steer their businesses towards growth
Website widget for patient registration, appointment booking and payment capture.
A telehealth platform with copay automation to add incremental revenue into clinics
Contact info@beamhealthgroup.com for more information or visit beam.health.