The money continues to flow into healthcare IT. Today’s announcement is an interesting funding, because it’s for a pretty niche healthcare IT product. Geek Wire announced that Valant Medical Solutions has closed a $937,000 angel round of funding.
Valant Medical Solutions, which has developed software to help psychiatrists manage billing and electronic medical records at their practices, has scored $937,000 in financing in an oversubscribed round, according to a SEC filing. The deal follows a $1 million round last December.
The timing was interesting since I’d been recently interacting with Valant Medical about possibly advertising across my network of EMR and EHR websites. I’m guessing a good portion of this new funding will go towards marketing their product and increasing their brand recognition.
As someone who has implemented an EMR in the mental health space, I can assure you that it’s quite different from a traditional EMR implementation. A simple example is the way a mental health counselor diagnosis. In mental health they use DSM IV as opposed to ICD-9, but the diagnosis also doesn’t usually change with every visit like it often does in most healthcare offices. Long story short, I think there’s definitely space for a behavioral health EMR to satisfy the unique needs of psychiatrists and counselors.
In the above linked article, I found this comment by David Lischner, founder of Valant Medical, quite interesting:
Our world domination strategy starts: “First with gaining market share, then connecting patients and providers, and lastly with providing a platform for transforming health care service delivery. Network effects will help us sustain market power as we add value to and extract revenue from all types of transactions within behavioral health care.”
I hope that Valant Medical makes it to the second and third things he mentioned. That’s when things should get really interesting.
[…] needs where they can benefit from a specialty specific EHR. Turns out investors seem to agree since Valant Medical recently closed an almost $1 million funding round. This is a good sign for mental health professionals looking for a mental health specific EHR […]