Another Bright Health selloff: Zipnosis sold to Florence Labs

May 24, 2023 | by

Bright’s money-raising continues. Bright Health’s Zipnosis was sold to Florence Labs for an undisclosed amount. Zipnosis, acquired stealthily by their Minneapolis neighbor Bright in the latter’s Happy Time of April 2021, is a telemedicine/telehealth company that provides white-labeled ‘digital front door’ asynchronous telehealth and diagnosis triage for large health systems fully integrated into hospital EHRs. Today’s release does not mention acquisition cost or management/employee transitioning, though Zipnosis is confirmed in their boilerplate to have about 60 employees. One suspects the sale amount was not large.

Notably, the Zipnosis website has been cleansed of any Bright Health identification or releases. A quick look at Zipnosis staff on LinkedIn indicates the cutover (and presumably the sale) took place in March but for various reasons such as financial closings was not announced until today.

Zipnosis is one of telehealth’s Ur-companies, founded in 2009 and gaining 50-60 health systems before their sale. Zipnosis was a good buy, lightly funded, and with a unique technology that fit well and conveniently into EHRs. It was a smart addition for Bright’s practices under NeueHealth along with entree to health systems. Their later and larger competition at least in synchronous telehealth for health systems was Bluestream Health, bought last month by eVisit as more evidence of healthcare consolidation. 

Florence Labs is a just-out-of-stealth startup based in NYC that automates clinical workflows and patient-facing access to address the problem of acute care clinical capacity. It was founded in 2021 by Aniq Rahman (president of Moat, acquired by Oracle in 2017 for $850 million). It was recently and modestly funded (March release) with $20 million in seed capital from Thrive Capital, GV (Google Ventures), and Salesforce Ventures with participation from Vast Ventures, BoxGroup, and Atento Capital. It’s currently working with about 40 healthcare systems, the most recently announced Luminis Health in Maryland.  It’s not to be confused with the significantly larger Florence Healthcare (clinical trial site enablement).  FierceHealthcare

A hybrid telehealth/telemedicine model for health systems

September 9, 2016 | by

Your Editors have been projecting that the Big Future of telecare-telehealth-telemedicine lies in integrating services, not the Big Data backend (though there’s a Big Role there). These three have to be more tightly aligned with health systems, whether ACOs/IDNs (US) or the NHS. Most of our consideration has been where they go at the end of acute care–transitional care (post-discharge/post-acute–those bed-blockers)–but here’s a different approach that puts them at the start of the care continuum. Minneapolis-based Zipnosis [TTA 13 May] has an asynchronous platform that is ‘white labeled’ for a health system and carries their branding. Their model uses pre-screening/assessment first–an ‘adaptive questionnaire’ taken online or on mobile, compiles the information, then depending on the result, returns to the patient to schedule a virtual (video/audio) consult, lab visit or referral to a physician. The smart parts are that this is completely within the the health system and integrates with their EHR, making it reimbursable. It also can be used to expand the patient base even if the care is short term or episodic.

Zipnosis currently has 17 health system clients. The latest is Fairview Health Services in Minneapolis where the system test is first with their 22,000-plus employee workforce. The focus is on early detection of diabetes and heart disease. Also recently announced were two Nebraska health systems, Bryan Health and Memorial Health Care. Somebody likes the model as their Series A back in January was $17 million led by Safeguard Scientifics with participation from Ascension Ventures, the investment arm of Ascension, a large Catholic health system. mHealth Intelligence, Becker’s Health IT, HealthcareITNews,