Andreessen Horowitz, also known as a16z, is one of the most well-known venture capital firms in Silicon Valley - and for good reason. With investments in such notable exits as Airbnb, Facebook, Box and Slack - Andreessen Horowitz has regularly been at the forefront of software trends disrupting traditional industry. With over $1.4Bn in its bio funds, a16z has a clear focus on remaining on the forefront of the rapid innovation occurring within the digital health space.
Notably, Julie Yoo, general partner at a16z with a focus on healthcare, recently issued a report defining 'The New Tech Stack For Virtual First Care' - calling out new, API-first solutions that are helping telehealth companies rapidly build more scalable, efficient operations.
Here at Verifiable, we’re thrilled to be called out as one of the notable companies listed in the a16z report currently powering virtual care companies, and are energized to have our API-first approach to provider credential verification and monitoring further validated by industry thought-leaders.
Digital Health Continues to Surge
Tracking the recent growth in the overall digital health market, Julie Yoo points out that 2020 was a record-breaking year in the number of digital health companies that got started and funded, as well as the extensive growth these platforms achieved in both patient utilization and revenue. In the a16z analysis, Yoo finds that more than 1,000 full-stack digital health companies have been started in the past three years, and believes “we’re truly entering into a new golden era for healthcare technology”
The staggering growth seen within the health-tech space is further captured in CBInsights recent State of Healthcare: Sector and Investment Trends to Watch report, which finds calls out that global digital health funding jumped 45% YoY in 2020, with telehealth startups raising over $10B in 2020 (and a record $3.3B in funding in Q4’20 alone).
Legacy Healthcare IT Fails to Deliver for Digital Health
New virtual care companies require much of the same back-end infrastructure as traditional healthcare providers, however legacy Healthcare IT solutions continue to lack the flexibility, interoperability, and ability to scale that the category requires. Therefore, to date, many digital health companies have needed to pursue the costly endeavor of building their tech stacks in house or fully outsource to costly manual operations.
The Rise of the 'New Tech Stack for Virtual First Care'
“In the same way that Plaid, Stripe and AWS abstracted out entire layers of infrastructure and dramatically reduced the cost and time to stand up a new tech business, these health-tech companies are now allowing digital health startups to accelerate their time to market and really focus on the higher-order elements of their products and services to deliver game-changing care to patients,”- Julie Yoo, General Partner, Andreessen Horowitz
Fortunately, strong growth in the digital health sector has spurred the rise of a new wave of health technology infrastructure - what Yoo has dubbed as 'The New Tech Stack for Virtual First Care'.
Solutions in this new stack span across the front office, clinical, and back office operations (where Verfiable's credential verification & monitoring platform sits). By providing flexible, scalable API-first offerings, digital health companies can easily integrate and configure them to fit their needs, tipping the scales of the "buy vs. build" decision. This allows telehealth companies to reinvest realized efficiencies and cost-savings back into delivering great care and value for their end users.
How Verifiable is Powering Leading Telehealth Companies
Since launching out of Y-Combinator, Verifiable’s API-first solution for healthcare provider credentialing and monitoring has become a trusted ‘go-to’ option for many leading virtual care companies, including Lyra, Talkspace, Forward, and Sesame.
Being an API-first platform and connected directly to thousands of primary sources, Verifiable can verify and monitor health provider credentials in real-time while directly integrating into the systems innovative virtual care organizations rely on most -- including their applicant tracking and onboarding flows or even into CRMs like Salesforce.
In partnering with Verifiable, customers have been able to automate provider license verification and monitoring and streamline provider screening workflows which previously took 3 days down to 3 minutes. Companies have also been able to reduce the data collection needs from providers during sign-up by nearly 50% - increasing conversion and improving provider experience while returning more accurate and real-time information to minimize compliance risk.
Optimizing your provider network operations
If you’re a company already operating in the telehealth space or are looking to expand delivery of existing services virtually - a scalable, efficient process for managing your provider network is critical to recruit top talent and serve rising demand for virtual services.
Digital health and virtual-first care companies are opting for flexible API-driven solutions like Verifiable to centralize and integrate license verifications, board certifications, NPI lookups, DEA registrations, and other key data directly into their existing workflows, core systems or end-platforms.
If you’d like to see how Verifiable can help modernize your provider onboarding, credentialing or enrollment processes - get in touch to see what we can do!
