Sometimes a funding round means more breathing room for a startup, quite literally.
When physician marketing platform PatientPop Inc. recently scored a $2.1 million seed round, the Santa Monica firm moved the 15 employees in its tiny 700-square-foot headquarters to a 5,000-square-foot space.
“It was not a pretty sight,” co-founder Travis Schneider said of the former tight squeeze. “I took a lot of phone calls on Santa Monica Boulevard, and we optimized the space with a lot of Ikea furniture. We made it work.”
In addition to extra leg room, PatientPop will use the funds to expand its overall 30-person head count as well as open a sales and customer support office in Las Vegas, which Schneider said would help the company sell its product nationally.
The team already includes executives with experience at digital health firms ZocDoc Inc. in New York and Irvine’s Kareo Inc. That was intentional because Schneider and co-founder Luke Kervin don’t hail from the health care world.
The duo previously co-founded and sold two e-commerce companies: Starbrand Media Inc. in Pacific Palisades and ShopNation Inc in Santa Monica.
“Health care is an industry that’s changing every day, whether it’s the rules and regulations or the trends, and we need to be able to understand the implications of those and react to them,” Schneider said.
It should also help that the investor leading PatientPop’s latest funding round was cloud-based electronic medical records and billing provider Athenahealth Inc. of Watertown, Mass. The startup also joined Athenahealth’s Bay Area accelerator and now can reach the digital health firm’s network of nearly 75,000 doctors, he said.
“That’s a compelling opportunity for a young company like ours, to have that access,” said Schneider, adding that PatientPop can now integrate its platform with Athenahealth’s, unlocking new features for clients.
Neumedicines, New Funding
After a dozen years and about $70 million in government grants and contracts, Pasadena immunotherapy maker Neumedicines Inc. is preparing to raise
its first round of private funding.
The company makes a proprietary version of a protein found in the body, Interleukin-12, which stimulates the immune system. Neumedicines has been developing its therapy for use as drug to fight cancer and a treatment for acute radiation sickness.
“If you imagine the horrific occurrence of a nuclear bomb going off in a city, the people in the middle are killed by the blast and those not killed get a high dose of lethal radiation in a few days,” explained Dr. Alexander K. Arrow, Neumedicines’ acting chief operating officer and a board member.
Interleukin-12 can stimulate the process of generating new bone marrow cells, which can help combat the effects of such intense radiation exposure.
“If it’s given within that 48-hour window after a nuclear event, you’ve got a good chance of that patient not dying from infection or hemorrhage,” Arrow said.
Neumedicines wants to raise private funds to commercialize the drug both for oncology and acute radiation sickness. It’s about to begin three phase-two clinical trials, which will use the drug to treat non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma and cutaneous T-cell lymphoma as well as a surgical wound treatment that boosts the immune system to fight infections and speed healing.
The private funds would allow Neumedicines to add more patients to the trials and add to its head count of more than 20 employees.
New Leadership
Michael Rembis, the new chief executive at El Segundo-based Avanti Hospitals, said the challenges of running for-profit safety-net hospitals like Avanti’s are no different than those facing the nonprofit hospitals he oversaw in the past.
“I have been in nonprofits and for-profits,” said Rembis, who joined Avanti in late June and previously was chief executive of Providence Saint Joseph Medical Center in Burbank and CHA Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center. “Even in nonprofit, everyone wants to make a profit to buy new equipment, hire more staff and stay in business, whether it’s perceived as profit or retention of earnings. … If you’re not making more money than expenses, you can’t do that.”
Granted, that can be tough when hospitals treating underserved populations, such as the ones Avanti operates in Gardena, Norwalk, Huntington Park and East Los Angeles, run on thin margins.
“We don’t have a lot of Blue Cross and commercial patients,” Rembis said. “It’s mostly government programs: Medicaid or Medicare. We try to run very efficiently and try to have a small profit we can reinvest back into the community.”
One valuable line of new business might be behavioral health. The field has been bolstered by Obamacare, which mandated that mental health and substance use disorder services be covered by health insurance plans starting last year.
“It’s one of the largest areas of need and there’s not enough providers in behavioral health,” Rembis said, noting the segment covers a wide spectrum of people suffering from drug and alcohol abuse and mental disorders. “Many come into emergency rooms to be treated, and they’re discharged and no one’s taking care of their issues so they don’t come back.”
Staff reporter Marni Usheroff can be reached at [email protected] or (323) 549-5225, ext. 229.
