The simplest, most accurate way to find a doctor: Announcing our investment in Ribbon Health

Most of us recognize that healthcare data is fragmented and inaccurate. In fact, data on medical providers—including information as seemingly simple as location address and contact phone number—is only 48% accurate. Because of this, patients have an unacceptably difficult time locating and contacting in-network physicians, and resolving these data inaccuracies cost healthcare organizations more than $2.76 billion annually.

Accurate provider directories are critical in helping refer patients to the best physicians, helping them navigate their care journey through different specialists, and assisting with the process of choosing the best plan for their needs. Patients need high quality information—information that helps health plans and providers differentiate in a highly competitive market. Clean provider data allows efficient claims adjudication and credentialing, while enabling members to find in-network, geographically-appropriate providers. Despite the pervasive need—within insurers, hospitals, digital health companies, and life science companies—for high quality information, provider data is typically maintained using labor-intensive manual or at best semi-automated techniques. This represents a drag on the effectiveness of the entire healthcare system.

A single entity like a health plan, for example, expends significant resources each and every year designing the best possible provider networks to handle high volume, provide high quality, and maintain reasonable costs for their members. At the same time, providers often still comb through physical binders—often containing outdated information—to find the right specialists for their patients.

A tremendous amount of the “workflow” in healthcare organizations is at once cumbersome and reliant on inaccurate or inaccessible data—creating delays and adding cost for everyone. Often, patients opt out of care because they are either unable to find it, don’t know the price, or the process of searching for care becomes too burdensome and complex.

That’s why we are proud to announce our investment in Ribbon Health, an API-first platform that simplifies complex healthcare workflow and unlocks real-time, accurate and comprehensive information on providers, facilities, insurance plans, costs, and quality of care. Rock Health joins General Catalyst, Andreessen Horowitz, BoxGroup, and Sachin Jain in Ribbon Health’s $43.5M Series B financing.

Ribbon offers workflow tools and a highly accurate provider directory that together enable improved network design, referral management, and decision making for health plans, providers, and digital health companies. In addition to offering the most comprehensive provider data in the industry, Ribbon’s platform provides critical data covering network information on ~80-90% of the applicable U.S. population and providers’ focus areas, relative cost effectiveness, and objective quality measures. Unlike legacy data providers who source/scrape and then “cleanse” master data, Ribbon has baked data quality management into its proprietary workflow services. The Ribbon’s workflow solutions are used, the more accurate Ribbon’s data becomes, which in turn improves the effectiveness of Ribbon’s workflow—in a self-reinforcing manner.

With Ribbon, health plans, for example, can design higher-quality, tailored provider networks for their members; providers can make more optimal referrals to specialists; and digital health companies can focus on building solutions—not infrastructure. Organizations can provide better, more cost effective care to patients, who are then empowered to take charge of their own health. We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Ribbon on this mission. Interested in learning more about how Ribbon is solving the provider data problem? Reach out to the Ribbon team for more information.

Rock Health Capital is an early-stage venture fund focused on digital health. We would love to hear from you. Get in touch!