Metriport is an open-source clinical data platform that helps healthcare organizations access and manage comprehensive patient medical data. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Metriport co-founder and chief operating officer Colin Elsinga to learn more about the company.
Background Of The Founders
Elsinga and Metriport co-founder and CEO Dima Goncharov have known each other for over 15 years and quit their software engineering jobs in 2021 to start Metriport. With a shared passion for health and fitness, they originally developed and launched a consumer health app, which was a quantified-self app to track various health-related things — such as steps, nutrition, and habits — and get insights into the data. They got into Y Combinator’s S22 batch shortly after they launched the app at the beginning of 2022, where they eventually pivoted Metriport from consumer to B2B, building the world’s first open-source API and platform for patient medical data.
Formation Of Metriport
How did the idea for Metriport come together? Elsinga said:
“After getting into Y Combinator, they started looking at ways to integrate with more data sources and quickly discovered how painful building EHR integrations and accessing medical data was. After talking to dozens of healthcare companies who also had the same problem, Dima and Colin set out to build a universal API for healthcare data, pivoting the company into B2B.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Elsinga’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Elsinga shared:
“Hiring our founding engineers after raising Metriport’s seed round out of Y Combinator and getting on TechCrunch with the fundraising announcement.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Elsinga explained:
“Metriport offers a Medical API and Dashboard. Through a single integration, Metriport ensures clinical accuracy and completeness of medical information to healthcare organizations, delivering comprehensive consolidated patient clinical data at the point of care. By standardizing, de-duplicating, consolidating, and hydrating the data with medical code cross walking, healthcare providers get a rich understanding of their patients’ clinical histories through Metriport.”
Challenges Faced
What have been some of the challenges faced in building the company so far? Elsinga acknowledged:
“One of the biggest bottlenecks has been the time and engineering effort required to build integrations with national Health Information Exchanges. This took months upon months to build, so Metriport solves a very painful technical challenge for any company looking to integrate with HIEs and unlock the rich and comprehensive data available in these networks. .”
Evolution Of Metriport’s Technology
How has Metriport’s technology evolved since launching? Elsinga noted:
“Back in December of 2022, Metriport launched an initial API that offered integrations to various wearable providers, helping health companies access smartwatch and mHealth app data from their users.
This was an initial offering Metriport put out while building integrations with Health Information Networks, such as CommonWell and Carequality. In September 2023, Metriport announced the official public launch of the Medical API and Dashboard, its flagship products.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Elsinga cited:
1.) Summer 2022: got accepted into Y Combinator’s S22 batch.
2.) Fall 2022: graduated YC and secured $2.4 million seed round of funding.
3.) December 2022: hired founding engineering team, launched the initial version of API, and shared fundraising announcement on TechCrunch.
4.) September 2023: announced the launch of open-source Medical API and Dashboard, enabling healthcare organizations to retrieve comprehensive medical data for their patients.
Customer Success Stories
After asking Elsinga about customer success stories, he highlighted:
Healthcare companies of all sizes use Metriport to retrieve patient medical records.
1.) “Companies like Circle Medical, for example, offer a virtual primary care for patients across the country, and use Metriport to automate their patient onboarding process, pulling comprehensive medical records for their patients ahead of appointments.”
2.) Companies like Delfina are doing pregnancy care and use Metriport to get data for their patients that have records that exist outside of the main EHR they integrate with.
4.) Companies like Kivo Health, for example, offer COPD treatment and were able to use Metriport to migrate off of fax machines for patient record retrieval during onboarding.
Funding
After asking Elsinga about funding information, he revealed that the company raised a $2.4 million seed round “from world-class investors such as Y Combinator, Triple Impact Capital, Nueterra Capital, Zillionize, VentureSouq, and more.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Metriport from its competition? Elsinga affirmed:
“Metriport is the world’s first healthcare data platform that is open-source, which brings new and unique value to the market in the following ways:
1.) Transparency — Vendors in the space that claim they want to improve interoperability are still making black box solutions. Nobody wants to share their secrets, and this stifles innovation in the healthcare space. Through Metriport’s open-source software it provides transparency into how everything is built, so companies can build on top of Metriport’s solution and innovate, rather than having to reinvent the wheel every time. No more black boxes!
2.) Reliability — At Metriport, there’s this concept that open-source equals ‘immortal code.’ If a closed-sourced company goes out of business tomorrow, all of its customers are left with nothing. With the open-source approach, Metriport’s customers can sleep at night knowing that they’re free of vendor lock-in, always maintaining the ability to self-host the crucial code they rely on.
3.) Security — Because source code can be externally audited any time, security vulnerabilities or other issues can be identified and addressed quicker than closed-source. Furthermore, closed-source vendors may not be as forthcoming about any security issues, leaving their customers vulnerable to potential security breaches.
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Elsinga concluded:
“Continue to provide a single source-of-truth for patient data in the US, building the world’s first open-source internet for healthcare.”
