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Carta Healthcare-Optimizing More Efficient Ways to Standardize and Leverage Hospital Data





The Driver:


Carta Healthcare recently completed the final closing of its $25M Series B funding round, with the addition of a total of $5M from Memorial Hermann Healthcare and Unity Point Ventures. These funds come in addition to the $20M announced in November 2022 from participants that included Mass General Brigham, American College of Cardiology, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Asset Management Ventures, Maverick Ventures Investment Fund, Frist Cressey Ventures, Paramark Ventures, and Storm Ventures. Including this $25M Carta’s total raised since its founding is now $42.3M according to Crunchbase. The company intends to use the proceeds to increase growth and fund additional investments in the A.I. underlying its technology.


Key Takeaways:

  • Carta states that Stanford Health Care has used its technology to manage its OR supplies, saving $4M per year (Carta Healthcare)

  • The median IT labor expense per health system rose over 30% between June 2019 and June 2023 (Strata Decision Technology),

  • The average salary for a data scientist in healthcare is just over $125.5K vs almost $136K for information technology and $130K in arts and entertainment (365 Data Science).

  • Hospitals lost almost 2.5% of their nursing staff in 2022 and the rate of nursing turnover actually exceeds the rate of overall hospital turnover and now stands at just over 27% (NSI National Healthcare Retention and Staffing Report)

The Story:


Carta was co-founded by CEO Matt Hollingsworth, whose mother is a 5x cancer survivor. According to the company, Matt essentially “grew up in hospitals' and was often puzzled that his mother’s doctors and nurses couldn’t provide him or his family with answers to questions as basic as how long her surgeries would take or what post-op room his mother would be in. Seeing that care coordination was disjointed, full of unpredictable patient journeys, and “rife with errors”, Matt decided to do something about it and hence, Carta was born. According to Matt, Carta’s mission is to “reduce the amount of time clinicians spend on mundane administrative tasks” such as filling out forms for clinician-specialized databases, known as registries.


By making significant enhancements to the registries, and gathering and analyzing data related to a patient’s diagnosis, treatment, and outcome Carta can help improve the understanding of diseases and also enable the detection of complications, side effects, and other safety concerns. According to a recent article in MedCity News, Carta’s technology is being used in 245 hospitals, across 18 health systems.


The Differentiators:

While Carta has 3 main products Atlas (a medical abstraction system), Semaphore (a healthcare data platform); Navigator (a healthcare business insights platform) they are all built on top of Cartographer, Carta’s healthcare analytics platform, that supports Carta’s broader product ecosystem. According to the company, Cartographer searches records from a myriad of hospital systems (pharmacy, EMR, Imaging, registries, etc.) then analyzes, interprets, and standardizes the data into a consistent format to provide the most relevant data to its other systems. Hollingsworth notes that this often replaces the large number of nurses needed to enter data for clinician registries but since Carta uses clinicians combined with AI, it has better accuracy than AI alone.


According to the company, getting the data in standardized form dramatically reduces the time needed by IT teams to collect and standardize data across systems, reducing the time for data collection, development of AI, and adoption from 3 years with the transitional process down to 3 months using Carta’s Semaphore product. In addition to Semaphore for AI analysis of patient data, Carta also sells Navigator for AI analysis and applications for hospital optimization. Hollingsworth notes that Stanford Health Care has used the technology to correctly estimate the amount of surgical supplies needed in the operating room and saved $4M per year.


The Big Picture:


According to the 2022 NSI National Health Care Retention & RN Staffing Report, in 2022 hospital turnover increased over 6% to almost 26%. The report also noted that hospitals lost almost 2.5% of their nursing staff in 2022 and that the rate of nursing turnover actually exceeded the rate of overall hospital turnover and now stands at just over 27% (27.1%). Tools like Carta which help reduce the amount of time that clinicians spend on low-value tasks are needed both to help reduce burnout but also improve the operational efficiency of hospitals. Moreover, with labor expense per FTE increasing almost 20% per year according to Strata Decision Technologies (June 2023 vs June 2019) labor costs will remain an issue for the foreseeable future.


This is true not only on the clinician side but also on the technology and IT side. For example, according to data from Strata, the median IT labor expense per health system rose over 30% vs 2019, so tools like Carta will be essential to not only reduce development times but help contain costs. This is particularly true as new tools like generative AI take hold and companies developing them actively bid for data science and development talent. This is relevant for healthcare IT that tends to lag other industries. According to 365 Data Science, the average salary for a data scientist in healthcare is just over $125.5K vs almost $136K for information technology and $130K in arts and entertainment.


Importantly, tools like Carta will help hospitals get data and actionable insights more rapidly which are necessary to power the insights needed for population health and value-based care which will be the key to bending the cost curve.



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