Jonathan Bush, who stepped down as CEO of ambulatory cloud-based EHR vendor athenahealth in 2018, is back. He has announced $34 million in Series A funding for his new company, Zus Health, noting that it is pronounced “Zeus” like the father of Athena.
Watertown, Mass.-based Zus said it plans to offer tools and capabilities across the “tech stack” in areas including:
• Healthcare Workflows: A growing library of software tools and services for patient relationship management and provider workflow apps, allowing digital health companies to build their own unique experiences and iterate with ease.
• Data Acquisition and Enrichment: A data aggregation service for pulling together, cleaning and logically joining medical records, claims and other data whose sharing are required. With complete access to codes, data and more, it’s suddenly so much easier to create and maintain a comprehensive understanding of any patient.
• Data Platform: This is what Zus calls the first industrial-strength, multi-tenant health record infrastructure. “A FHIR-native, exhaustively maintained, never overwritten, patient-centric source of truth, it is also paired with the ability for builders to store their own proprietary data in a way that is secure and logically joined to the patient record,” the company said.
• Patient Identity and Control: A unified record giving patients power over their health data, by enabling authority of personal information across disparate sources of their healthcare journey.
The company launched with four builders on its platform including Cityblock Health, Dorsata, Firefly Health and Oak Street Health. The company said these builders will start to use Zus as an “information sidecar” and then proceed to build proprietary apps for consumption and sale over time.
“Created for this magic moment when capital, policy and urgency are colliding all at once, Zus hopes to be an accelerant to the tectonic industry change we are seeing; from creating the means for healthcare’s young builders to share health information on our platform to providing the tools for those same builders to develop their offerings at considerably greater speed and less cost than on their own,” Bush said in a statement. “As more modern-day healthcare companies arrive on the scene each will now benefit from the presence of the other, and the overall health system benefits from the arrival of this next-generation community.”
The Series A financing was led by Andreessen Horowitz. F-Prime Capital, Maverick Ventures, Rock Health, Martin Ventures and Oxeon Investments also participated in the round.
