Putting Money Where the Mox(i)e Is

When I woke up last week, I had to pinch myself. Then I had to refrain from making a peep, because my one-year-old sleeps—and I use sleep in the loosest sense of the word—steps away from my bed. 

The day before, Moxe closed on $30M in funding, led by Piper Sandler and Vensana Capital. Existing investors  Apollo Global and 3M Ventures also lent their support in this funding round, for which I am extremely grateful. In addition to the investors who joined our Series B, we wouldn’t be here without the support of prior investors and mentors who helped us get off the ground in the first place.

When I founded Moxe in 2012, I knew I wanted to name the business after a word I’ve always had a great affection for: moxie. Many know “moxie” by the “energy, determination, spunk, daring courage, nerve, spirit, guts” definition. And while any effort to change healthcare for the better requires all those traits, what I secretly love about the word is that it was coined relatively recently in New England—where my family spent generations manning lighthouses up and down the Maine coast—by a soda company who positioned themselves as a medicinal elixir. Moxie Cola claimed their “nerve food” would strengthen the nervous system. While I knew any company that I was going to put my blood, sweat, and tears into would have to have energy and pep, the past 10 years have truly revealed just how much moxie Moxe has. 

It's a privilege to partner with our investors, as well as our present and future customers, to tackle the challenge of making healthcare more affordable. I’m proud of our team for the work they’ve done to elicit this huge vote of confidence, and I’m grateful for how this funding will allow us to invest in innovation, provide enhanced value for our customers, and scale to continue to drive results that meet our customers’ needs.

Momentum for our mission

The problem we’ve been solving for—making healthcare more affordable by reducing administrative waste—still very much exists. Just ask anyone who has gotten a medical bill lately.

In healthcare, we talk a lot about the quadruple aim and the need to move towards value-based care. Those are great and noble causes. But, if healthcare is not affordable, it’s not accessible. Quality of care is important, but if you can’t afford it, it doesn’t really matter. 

Healthcare spending in our country is out of control, and a meaningful $900B of healthcare costs come from administrative waste. Just as the environmental discussion has moved from “curb emissions” to “carbon recapture,” it’s time to move the discussion in healthcare from “bend cost curve” to “collapse costs.”

We don’t want to be in a position, however, where collapsing costs means limiting access to care. To avoid this, we need players across the entire healthcare ecosystem to step up.

At Moxe, we aim to be the privacy-centric platform that enables the entire healthcare ecosystem to operate more efficiently by empowering all stakeholders with meaningful, actionable information where and when they need it. The outcome: high quality, affordable healthcare.

Our mission is both important and urgent. I want to see more of our healthcare dollars put towards increased clinical staff, research and development, drug discovery, and novel cures—not on administrative overhead. 

There is no country better positioned to be at the forefront of research and development. Let’s eliminate waste that’s going into prior authorizations, payment integrity, claims processing, contract negotiations, and more, and instead invest our dollars in things that are going to make for a healthier country and world.

Now more than ever, I’m confident that we are well positioned to truly revolutionize the way clinical data is exchanged by being the highest quality, cost effective source of clinical data for healthcare organizations who share our goal of making healthcare more affordable. 

Data, data everywhere, nor any drop to drink

For lack of a better analogy, or maybe because I live in Wisconsin where it’s easy to have farming on the brain, we’ve historically been data harvesters in healthcare. Patient records have diligently been digitized over the past few decades. Data is being collected, but what do we do with it? What is it good for? 

At Moxe, we help organizations move away from harvesting and hoarding data. Instead, we want to see data being used to improve the way care is delivered, drive down costs, and, importantly, reduce friction between providers and payers.

We recognize that the world is getting more complex. The need for privacy-centric data exchange and privacy-centric interoperability is only becoming more pronounced. We want to be the trusted partner for anyone who needs to share data outside of their organization—with patients, other clinicians, insurance companies, lawyers, and more.

Protecting patient privacy while delivering data at the right time to the right place

Sharing useful, timely data is transformative, and we believe in sharing everything that should be shared. Sharing data must be balanced, however, with a patient’s right to privacy and discretion. There needs to be a legitimate reason and purpose of use of everything that is shared. 

Organizations shouldn’t be harvesting and hoarding data that quickly becomes outdated and not useful. 

Instead, we want to see organizations use our bidirectional clinical data exchange solutions to get fresh data whenever they need what’s current. Our solutions are designed not just to get as much data as possible into requestors’ hands; they’re designed to get the right data into the right hands at a time something can actually be done with the data. Our solutions are also designed to not only exchange data securely, but also to protect patient privacy. Alarmingly, patient privacy can too easily fall to the wayside when data is exchanged, even if that exchange is done securely.

There are others who are working hard to make clinical data exchange work better, smarter, and faster—which is wonderful. There’s much work to be done and an ecosystem of aligned parties is required to make a large enough impact on our overall healthcare costs. As a neutral party, Moxe is uniquely positioned to lead in this space. We connect directly with providers and payers to securely exchange high quality, complete data in meaningful, usable formats, regardless of the EHR or provider. 

Looking to the future

The $30M we recently secured is a huge vote of confidence. With that vote of confidence, comes a great deal of responsibility to live up to the promises we’ve made to our customers and to ourselves.

Our recent funding round will allow us to extend our application set and capabilities to handle more use cases and be able to work with more data sources. When we were starting out, our focus was on working with some of the biggest EHRs in the country. I’m thrilled that this funding will allow us to work with smaller, specialty EHRs—the ambulatory care EHRs, for example. Wherever patients are receiving care and there is a clinical documentation system that holds patient data, we want to be a partner there.

Our recent funding round also means we’ll be able to continue to expand and fine tune our powerful bidirectional data exchange capabilities. We recognize that this isn’t a one-way street; it isn’t all about getting data from healthcare organizations to other groups. It’s also about getting data from other groups back to the healthcare organizations in a way that can improve the patient and clinical experience. We’ll continue to enhance our Convergence toolset to work with more platforms and workflows.

In short, we are committed to being the highest quality, most cost-effective source of data for high-value use cases, and this funding will allow us to invest more in becoming that.

My promise to you is that we will continue to be pioneers in the exchange of clinical data. As I look to the future, I’m grateful to the customers, employees, and investors who have put their faith in our mission and team. Thank you for partnering with us on our quest to solve one of the biggest challenges of our time: healthcare affordability.

If you want to join us and revolutionize how healthcare is delivered so it’s more affordable and accessible to all, please reach out. We’d love to chat about how we can partner.