Truentity Health raised $1M in pre-seed funding, the cloud-based health platform announced today. Raleigh-based Truentity will use this money to hire additional clinical and product team members and bring on more customers, said Mike Desai, the startup’s CEO and Founder.
The pre-seed round was led by Rajit Malhotra, the founder of August Holding and a Venture Partner at New York- and San Francisco-based Peak State Ventures, with participation from strategic angel investors and operators including Nainesh Parikh, Assistant Chief Medical Officer, Moffitt Cancer Center; David White, CEO and Founder, IHD Labs; and Alan Safdi, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Quadrant AI and CEO of MD Health.
“This is a great milestone for us,” Desai said. “This will help us go out and hire additional clinical team members.”
From the beginning, Truentity was designed to help healthcare providers and patients manage medications across multiple systems, all in an effort to prevent medical-related injuries and death. [Editor’s Note: We first profiled Truentity last February.]
Medication errors are the leading cause of these injuries and deaths, with leading research firm Forrester predicting the healthcare industry will face even greater medication errors in 2022, costing over $528.4 billion annually. That is equivalent to a whopping 16 percent of total U.S. healthcare expenditures.
Desai’s family experienced a close call themselves when his father once went to his non-primary care provider and was accidentally prescribed double doses of medication.
“Luckily, we caught it because there are a lot of physicians and pharmacists in my family,” Desai said. “So we caught it before he took it. But that helped me launch this whole idea around, why do medication errors happen? Why can’t patients properly communicate what medications they’re on to their provider?”
It’s a question many have been asking. So Desai formed Truentity, which works as a platform to consolidate all the data from different providers and pharmacy networks. Then telehealth clinical pharmacists sit down with the patient to reconcile the data, creating the most accurate medication history on a patient after only a 30-minute conversation.
Patients can also upload pictures of their medication to Truentity themselves before Truentity’s data then goes back to providers, leading to fewer medication errors and better outcomes, Desai said.
“A patient’s data resides with the provider or the hospital systems,” Desai said of what happens today. “What we have essentially done is once we do a reconciliation of the patient’s medication history, we push the data back to the patient’s phone because the patient has the right to own their own data.”
And whenever a medical ailment does strike, a healthcare provider could learn a patient’s medication history as easily as scanning a QR code.
“Now, essentially, the patient is walking around with their medication list on their phone,” Desai said. “Now they can travel anywhere in the world.”
It’s simple. Just open up the app, launch the QR code and now the provider can see the list of medications their patient is on. No guesswork or extra time involved.
Evidence of early traction
Over the past three months, Truentity’s user base doubled, with the company projecting three times as much growth over the next three months. And early results showed a 45 percent improvement in the accuracy of patient medication records with Truentity.
Truentity, which is also a graduate of CED’s GRO incubator program, is saving clients time as well. The company said providers save up to 40 minutes per patient during the pre-admission or post-discharge medication reconciliation process.
Desai said that through the process, they learned to not just stay in their bubble designing the product but to venture out more and talk to customers, completing small releases of the product and learning as they go.
“That’s what we’ve been doing—go out, deploy to that pilot site, and then we come back and say, ‘O.K., what did we learn from that initial deployment?’” Desai said. “And then we will make the necessary changes. We will create better workflows and better integrations.”
Truentity is currently deployed at three healthcare providers and pharmacy sites. With the pre-seed funding in hand, Truentity Health’s app on iOS and Android will be able to scale more quickly.
Beyond consolidating data to prevent medical errors, Truentity also enables pharmacists to earn extra money by completing patient medication histories on a part-time basis. This is especially helpful in areas with a lack of resources.
“We really go after the pharmacy and the provider space because we have found that we can actually help generate revenue for these providers,” Desai said, “especially in rural parts of America where small providers don’t have enough resources.”
