LeanTaaS, a predictive analytics company based in Charlotte, North Carolina and Santa Clara, California that leverages data science to improve health care provider performance, today raised $130 million. LeanTaaS says the funds will be used to build out the company’s existing suite of products as well as to scale its engineering, product, and go-to-market teams.
Long patient wait times can be the undoing of a large clinic or hospital system. According to a recent survey, 84% of patients consider a reasonable wait somewhat or very important to a quality experience, and 30% say they’ve left a medical appointment because of an inordinately long wait. Perhaps unsurprisingly, there’s a strong correlation between offices with longer average wait times and low patient satisfaction scores, even accounting for the pandemic. And a whopping 20% of patients say they’d consider changing providers due to wait times alone.
That’s why Mohan Giridharadas, a Stanford graduate and former McKinsey and Company partner, founded LeanTaaS in 2010. The startup quickly went on to raise $14 million in venture capital and partner with 20 centers within the not-for-profit National Comprehensive Cancer Network alliance and 30 National Cancer Institute member institutions. Memorial Sloan Kettering, NewYork-Presbyterian, Penn Medicine, Stanford Health Care, and UCSF Health are among its over 300 hospital and health system customers.
Proprietary algorithms underpin LeanTaaS’ marquee product, iQueue, which matches available assets — including operating rooms, infusion chairs, ambulatory clinics, imaging assets, and inpatient beds — with patients and clinicians who need them. The platform considers hundreds of real-world operational constraints and continuously self-improves by comparing anticipated with actual performance, ostensibly improving patient access and staff satisfaction while decreasing wait times and operating costs.
Above: Above: LeanTaaS’ iQueue block-based scheduling system. (Image credit: LeanTaaS)
Image Credit: LeanTaaS
iQueue comes in three flavors: iQueue for Operating Rooms, iQueue for Infusion Centers, and iQueue Labs.
The first, iQueue for Operating Rooms, offers a marketplace and dashboards designed to boost surgeon access with actionable metrics by ingesting electronic health record data from providers like Epic, Cerner, Meditech, Allscripts, and McKesson. Across more than 1,750 operating rooms, it suggests allocation changes and determines whom to take away time from (versus whom to give it to), enabling surgeons to monitor abandoned and released time blocks from the web or a mobile app and request those blocks on-demand from health care system schedulers.
Similarly, iQueue for Infusion Centers, which LeanTaaS customers use to manage over 7,500 chairs, looks at daily appointment patterns, chair utilization, and staff availability to suggest available appointment slots. It creates calendar schedules that maximize patient flow and chair usage, with templates engineered to minimize delays and fully utilize resources. A schedule shifter feature suggests ways to restructure and to improve a future day’s schedule, while daily and weekly huddle reports provide start-of-the-day views of anticipated chair utilization and over- and under-booking estimations. Every morning, the system sends a summary email to center leaders that spotlights patterns and trends concerning patient volumes, add-ons and no-shows, patient arrivals, wait times, cycle times, and more. A separate nurse allocation report previews the day’s nurse availability by time and treatment length.
As for iQueue Labs, it orchestrates both medical imaging and phlebotomy labs processes. On the imaging side, it predicts the demand pattern of incoming imaging orders by time of day and day of week, balancing the various stages of the workloads to ensure a smooth flow. iQueue projects the patient demand for each category of phlebotomy lab test by time of day and day of week, and it handles patient placement and right-sized bed and unit capacity planning, as well as handling census taking and streamlining discharge.
LeanTaaS recently launched iQueue for Inpatient Beds, which aims to capture the complexities and characteristics of individual hospital units to surface admission bottlenecks down to the service and level of care. The University of Colorado Health, which recently deployed it, claims that iQueue for Inpatient Beds saves its staff an average of 60 minutes per day by automating data compilation and searching.
LeanTaaS’ portfolio targets several lucrative health care software sectors, including the patient scheduling app segment (which is anticipated to reach $444.1 million by the end of 2019) and the operating room management segment ($3.41 billion by 2022). It’s not without competitors — University of Washington spinout Perimatics offers an AI system that uses data on patients and surgeons to predict the length of surgeries, as do Tagnos and Qventus — but LeanTaaS has market momentum on its side.
Insight Partners led the series D funding round announced today with participation from Goldman Sachs. It brings LeanTaaS’ total raised to date to over $250 million during a year in which revenue grew 50% year-over-year.
