Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health (Part 5)

Kristen Valdes: During that time, I had given birth to my second child Bailey. She was born with a very significant auto-immune condition. She had a near fatal incident because two EMR systems couldn’t communicate with one another. At that point, I realized that it didn’t matter how much expertise I had gained in healthcare. I knew how to navigate the system. I couldn’t do it on behalf of my own family.

That’s when I became the Excel-plotting mom trying to figure out if she could have been diagnosed faster, could we have avoided this near-death complication if we had all the information at our fingertips. I left and I launched b.well. We need to take the friction and fragmentation out of healthcare and deliver seamless and simple user experiences.

The only way to do that is to connect all of the stakeholders behind the scenes from a data perspective and deliver a platform that could move as fast as technology. That’s the underpinning value and mission of b.well. 

Sramana Mitra: Excellent. What’s the trajectory of the company? Is it bootstrapped or funded?

Kristen Valdes: Up until July of this year, we were funded completely through our customers. We have taken strategic money in to help us build to this point. I’m happy to report that we have employers, payers, health systems, and retail pharmacies as investors. In July, we just closed our Series B and brought in our first institutional venture capital fund HLM.

We’re very excited to continue to be recognized from a momentum and growth perspective in the market. Folks are really leaning into the tailwinds created by the regulatory space. We’ve got some really great partners and all our existing investors who are customers also came back into the round.

Sramana Mitra: What’s the total amount of funding in the company now?

Kristen Valdes: We’ve raised just under $60 million. 

Sramana Mitra: What revenue level are you at?

Kristen Valdes: We don’t publicly report our revenue, but we’re growing 4x year over year.

Sramana Mitra: Do you have a range?

Kristen Valdes: We are under the $50 million mark.

Sramana Mitra: From your vantage point, what are some open problems in the digital health space that you have spotted that you would encourage new entrepreneurs to go look into?

Kristen Valdes: As we continue down this theme of shoppability, we’ve seen the regulatory space take a very clear position on things like price transparency. There have been solutions in the past around price transparency, but they are not truly specific to an individual. The government has passed regulations that now have over 300 shoppable services that have to be reported by health systems and providers across the country and have been very clear that those prices are going to have to be expanded.

Unfortunately, the mandate was that all those prices be posted on a website. We’d love to help consumers look at whether they should use their benefit versus cash pricing like we can do in the pharmacy side of things, but we can’t do it on the medical side because it would involve portal scraping and trying to find which providers are showing the information.

If somebody can get the industry to align and aggregate that pricing to the point where it’s not used for competitive advantage, but it’s used for consumers to have informed choices on what services they need and can be adjusted by any patient-facing third-party application; that would be super useful.

It’s early days in price transparency and shopping. We know that it’s going to continue. We also know that new types of discounts and coupons are going to come out as it becomes more popular and easier for consumers to shop for healthcare services. Compiling all that and make it accessible through open APIs is a problem definitely worth solving.

Sramana Mitra: Terrific. Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 5 in the series : Thought Leaders in Healthcare IT: Kristen Valdes, CEO of b.well Connected Health
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