Conversa Health Chatbot Raises $12 Million – Venture-Med: Investing in Healthcare Innovation

Conversa Health offers an innovative, automated virtual healthcare chatbot that provides an automated conversation to help people monitor their health.

Conversa recently raised $12 million in Series B funding; the round was co-led by Builders Venture Capital and Northwell Ventures. Other investors included UH Ventures, P5 Health Ventures, and Nassau Street Ventures. All totaled, Conversa has raised more than $26 million in funding.

What Conversa Does

Conversa partners with healthcare systems to virtually converse with patients to manage and monitor their healthcare needs. The platform creates a profile for each patient based on their medical records, symptoms, and insurance claims. With machine learning, the platform can set the level of contact and personalize messages based on the patient’s profile.

Healthcare providers can use the Conversa platform to create automated healthcare conversations via chatbot. The simulated conversations center around chronic-condition management, pre- and post-surgery, post-hospital discharge, and adherence to medication. Likewise, pharmacies can use the platform to educate people about their medications as well as sending reminders to take their medications.

The platform also assists patients monitor and track the progress of their conditions. For example, a person can record their blood pressure using the app, and if necessary, the Conversa platform can prompt the person to contact their healthcare provider.

Moreover, Conversa has launched an ensemble of COVID-19 programs for organizations and businesses to ensure their employees are healthy before they return to work. Using the platform’s automated messaging, workers can get screened before work, track their symptoms, and receive lab results.

What Conversa Will Use the Funding For

The company plans to use the funding to scale up its virtual healthcare communication platform. Conversa plans to continue helping healthcare providers and pharmacists save both time and money while tracking patients’ progress and needs.

Chatbots Becoming the Norm in Patient Interaction

Medical centers and physicians increasingly use chatbots as a way to avoid direct interaction with patients, especially during the prolonged shutdowns due to COVID-19.

Microsoft released its own chatbot, nicknamed the plasmabot, a few months ago. The bot calls up COVID-19 survivors to convince survivors to donate plasma.

Automated messaging is common in the mental health sector, and Aetna has partnered with Wysa to help clinicians avoid their patients during the pandemic. Rather, the Wysa chatbot encourages practices such as meditation, yoga, and breathing exercises to help patients build resiliency skills during this unprecedented time.

A chatbot is useful when saving healthcare organizations time and money, but some worry about relying on computers to care for the physically and mentally ill.

A Game-Changing Platform

“With Conversa’s game-changing platform delivering proven results for leading healthcare systems, the moment is now,” said Mark Goldstein, a BuildersVenture Capital partner and Conversa board of directors member. “With COVID-19, Conversa has become even more critical. Hospitals know that ongoing remote patient contact, data analysis, and monitoring, via both telehealth and integrated apps, is necessary to reduce costly, in-person contact and improve outcomes.”

At the center of the COVID-19 pandemic, Northwell Health has cared for nearly 50,000 COVID-19 patients. “Even before COVID-19, we have expanded our use of Conversa throughout our organization, as they are a critical part of Northwell Health’s goal of virtual health. Conversa reinforces the provider-patient relationship with insightful, personalized engagement via simulated conversations,” said Joseph Schulman, Northwell Health’s Senior Vice President, Population Health, Business Transformation. “We’ve successfully used Conversa to scale our care and communications for thousands of COVID-19 patients, focusing on quarantine, lab results, antibody tests, and more. Conversa has been an exceptional partner!”

With the emergence of virtual healthcare, Conversa continually evolves and expands to meet the needs of healthcare systems, pharmaceutical companies providers, and payers.