Zus Health is the latest company to set off on a quest for the Holy Grail of healthcare – a universal patient record – and it just landed a $40M venture round to help it in its pursuit.
Founded in 2021 by healthcare veteran Jonathan Bush, Zus originally planned on creating a “Build-a-Bear for EMR, patient relationship management, and CRM” by offering a shared data record and software development kit that other companies could use to build their own tools.
That mission appears to be alive and well, but Zus is also looking to grow into a new role as “the common information ground” that brings comprehensive patient information to the point of care.
The Zus platform centers around the Zus Aggregated Profile (ZAP), a unified view of a patient’s healthcare info aggregated from EHRs, labs, claims networks, and other sources.
- This network provides access to data across 70K+ provider sites and 270M+ patients, which Zus then distills into a user-friendly patient profile through FHIR-normalization, deduplication, and summarization.
- The first time a provider uses Zus to “get up to speed” on a patient, Zus charges $4 to pull the data and plug it into the EHR. Zus then charges a monthly fee for providers to continue receiving updates on that patient.
Zus works with EHR companies that offer the ZAP as an upgrade to their provider customers in exchange for a share in the resulting revenue.
- Alongside the funding news, Zus announced a partnership with Elation Health to bring the ZAP to its EHR that currently supports over 12M patients.
- The Elation announcement follows similar partnerships with Healthie and Canvas, which both saw 95%+ of their providers included in the first rollout upgrade to Zus after a preview of the service.
The Takeaway
More than a few companies have been tempted by the prospect of bringing comprehensive patient information to the point of care, and it hasn’t exactly worked out optimally for any of them. That said, with the 21st Century Cures Act facilitating more health data sharing and a pandemic that’s pulled digital health innovation forward in a drastic way, there’s a case to be made that the timing’s never been better. It’s a long road to get from Build-a-Bear for Healthcare to Universal Patient Record, but the upside is massive if Zus can pull it off.
