One of the first things we do when deciding where to buy a house or what company to work for is look at independent rankings. But we rarely do that when making health decisions, like where we have surgery or deliver a baby.
Mpirica Health thinks those decisions should be more data-based, and it’s building a platform fueled by artificial intelligence that ranks hospitals based on actual health outcomes.
The Seattle area startup just closed a $4.6 million Series A round led by equity crowdfunding service OurCrowd, bringing the company’s total funding to $6.6 million. The funds will help the startup roll out its service on a national scale and continue to develop its platform.
“Our vision is that in the future no one would ever consider booking a surgery without first knowing the MPIRICA Quality Score of their hospital or surgeon,” Mpirica co-founder and Chief Marketing Officer Chris Diede told GeekWire in an email interview.
“We’ve heard our score referred to as a ‘FICO Score for Surgery’ before, or perhaps better, the ‘batting average’ of a provider’s demonstrated performance at a given procedure.”
The company’s ranking system is based on work by Dr. Michael Pine, a cardiologist and founder of MPA Healthcare Solutions. He has been developing transparent evaluation and ranking systems for hospitals for over 30 years, something that has historically been lacking in the field. Pine sits on Mpirica’s board and MPA is also an investor in the company.
Mpirica’s platform combines Pine’s system with health insurance claims data gathered from the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services to come up with rankings for hospitals. The rankings are broken out by different procedures — like knee replacements or C-sections — and region.
Check out this graphic to see how all the data comes together.
Access to the rankings costs $49 for individuals, for three months of access to data on one procedure in one region. Companies and health plans can also buy a premium subscription for their customers or employees, and Diede said Mpirica is working on more B2B partnerships.
Mpirica — whose name is a play on “empirical,” describing an evidence-based approach — was founded in 2014 by Diede, current Mpirica CEO and former Microsoft manager Shakil Haroon and current VP of Business Development Bob Piper.
The company employs 12 full- and part-time employees at its headquarters in the Bellevue, Wash., coworking space WeWork Lincoln Square.
