Carmel health tech startup lands $2.5M seed investment
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Carmel-based health care technology startup Blue Agilis Corp. has secured a $2.5 million round of seed funding from one of the nation’s largest health care payers.
The funding round closed on March 10, said Blue Agilis co-founder and CEO Nadia Adams. She declined to identify the investor. “I can’t say who, because the CEO doesn’t want to tip off the market,” she said.
Blue Agilis has a post-seed-investment valuation of $42.5 million, which Adams said is unusually high for a two-year-old startup. The valuation is based on both existing revenue and projections of future revenue.
Adams and her cofounders, Dr. Malaz Boustani and Dr. Jose Azar, launched Blue Agilis in January 2021 and the company now has 10 employees. Its customers include insurers, health care systems and independent physician groups, including “several blue-chip customers,” Adams said.
“I really think the market has signaled to us that this is something that they need,” Adams said.
The company’s software platform helps health care providers implement the latest medical research into their practice, with the goal of delivering better outcomes and controlling health care costs. The goal is to move the industry beyond one-size-fits-all standards of care and into a model where care can be customized based on a patient’s diagnosis, age, race and other factors.
If a patient is diagnosed with a particular disease, for instance, Blue Agilis can recommend the best research-based plan of care for that patient, and help set up a structure to make sure that those recommended follow-up visits, tests and other interventions actually happen.
“What we’ve been doing in the past is relying on human memory to do these types of things, and that just doesn’t work,” Adams said.
In the bigger picture, Adams said, Blue Agilis can help the health care industry in its transition away from a fee-for-services model, in which insurers reimburse health care providers based on the services they provide to patients. The newer model, she said, is a value-based care model in which providers are reimbursed based on the patient’s health care outcome and the quality of care.
Adams said Blue Agilis plan to use its seed investment to improve its software platform, with a focus on artificial intelligence and machine learning.
Adams has a background in health care quality improvement. Immediately before launching Blue Agilis, she worked as senior vice president of population health and care innovation at New Jersey-based Continuum Health, a physician-owned medical group.
Before that, she served as chief operating officer for the Indiana University School of Medicine’s Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science. She’s also worked as program manager at both the Indianapolis-based Regenstrief Institute Inc. and IU Health.
She also has personal motivation for her work. Her brother, Peter, was born with his umbilical cord wrapped around his neck and suffered severe brain damage as a result.
“My personal mission is to eliminate preventable medical errors and events,” Adams said.
Adams was named as an IBJ Woman of Influence in 2016 and one of IBJ’s Forty Under 40 honorees in 2017.
Boustani is the chief innovation and implementation officer at the Center for Health Innovation and Implementation Science. Azar serves at chief quality officer at Hackensack Meridian Health, a health care system in New Jersey.