axialHealthcare, a Nashville-based healthcare optimization company dedicated to navigating substance abuse issues for patients and healthcare providers, has announced the closing of a $15 million Series C equity financing round. The company will use the funding to jumpstart its expansion into the substance use disorder (SUD) treatment and recovery spaces.
“This funding will support the market launch of an end-to-end platform that offers personalized solutions from risk to recovery, with a new emphasis on connecting and aligning what is a fractured ecosystem for recovery. In collaboration with our client partners, we are devoted to finding a better way to support patients and families struggling with the complexities of SUD,” axialHealthcare CEO Carter Paine said in a statement.
Previous institutional investors Oak HC/FT, .406 Ventures, BlueCross BlueShield Venture Partners (BCBSVP), and Sandbox Advantage Fund led the round.
axialHealthcare provides a comprehensive risk-to-recovery platform that serves patients, healthcare providers and health plan providers with the tools they need for addiction assessment, treatment treatment and recovery. It has also adopted a new treatment and recovery focus that creates a more hands-on approach to whole-patient care to help enable recovery.
The company links at-risk patients to recovery partners that onboard them into treatment programs, assess their healthcare needs, provide assistance with care and contingency plans, and give them access to peer recovery specialists that can walk them through the realities of the recovery process.
axialHealthcare also provides healthcare providers with “integrated intelligence” that combines timely intervention and notification tools designed to identify risks to patients via prescription monitoring and analytics surveillance with comprehensive patient support comprising treatment enrollment and transition planning.
This support also includes access to patient care teams to assist recovery, help with medication-assisted treatment methods, and assessing patients’ social determinants of health (SDoH) that could interfere with recovery. The company also gives health plan providers tools to assess patient risk, data analysis designed to identify these risks to curb costs, and customized health-care plans.
“While early prevention and risk mitigation efforts will continue to be critical, it’s become increasingly apparent that addressing the next phase of the opioid epidemic and SUD in general requires a greater focus on treatment and recovery,” said Paine.
axialHealthcare notes that the U.S. opioid epidemic has evolved in recent years. Although the practice of overprescribing opioids has decreased, drug overdoses and hospital admissions have increased. Despite more opioid patients in hospitals, 80 percent of SUD patients don’t receive any actual treatment. The company addressed this evolution by expanding its scope from using proprietary analytics focused on risk prevention and mitigation for SUD patients with elevated drug-related safety concerns to include treatment conversion and adherence.
“With more than 19 million Americans suffering from SUD, there’s a dire need for a comprehensive solution that can address the changing epidemic our country is facing, and the axialHealthcare team is uniquely positioned to be that solution,” Nancy Brown, general partner at Oak HC/FT and axialHealthcare board member, said in a statement. “axialHealthcare has been a leader within the prevention landscape and their new expansion into treatment offers clients an end-to-end solution that improves patient outcomes no matter where they are on the substance use spectrum.”
