Health-coaching software dev Twine Health raises $6.75 in Series A

MIT-spun-off Twine Health said yesterday it closed a $6.75 million Series A round for its health coaching platform and associated applications.

The company’s main development, an SaaS-based coaching platform, was developed originally at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and has been tested over 6 years.

Twine Health itself was only created 2 years ago, according to the Boston Business Journal, while the software has been validated on approximately 1,000 patients and dozens of clinicians at Boston Medical Center, Mayo Clinic, Joslin Diabetes Center, and Massachusetts General Hospital.

Twine said it tested its software in a clinical trial with Massachusetts General Hospital, which showed an average drop of 26mmHg in blood pressure after 3 months with care through the program, compared with an average drop of 6mmHg with traditional care in a year.

In a trial with Joslin Diabetes Center, Twine reported an average 3.2 drop in HbA1C compared to a traditional average drop of 1.0 after a year of care.

“Our clinical partners have bought into true health coaching. To us, that’s having care teams who work with patients to set goals and provide continuous support to reach those goals. The key to successful health coaching is an empathetic human touch from someone who understands the psychology of health behavior change. Twine’s philosophy is to revere the art of that health coach. Instead of trying to replicate or replace that human touch, we build technology that allows health coaches to scale their reach to superhuman proportions and empowers patients to build maximal self-efficacy,” CEO John Moore said in a press release.

The company’s core program features sets of goals created on a clinician’s end and sent out to patient via an app or through a browser to remind and encourage them to meet the goals. Goals can include a number of issues ranging from mental health and physical health-improving activities to disease management and health monitoring, Twine Health said.

Patients and clinicians can track progress and communicate through the platform to make adjustments based upon the results, the company said.

“We’re in an ideal position to accelerate the crucial transition to value-based healthcare by as much as a decade. In 2015 we did the hard work of getting actual results with our clinical partners, which were all extremely positive. We now are embarking on a strategy to make Twine a ‘must-have’ for organizations of all types that bear risk for patient outcomes and are managing to the bottom line,” co-founder and chair Frank Moss said in prepared remarks.

The round was joined by Khosla Ventures, Provenance Venture Forum and Tower Capital Partners, as well as individual investors Andy Palmer, James Pallotta and Henri Termeer.

“The time is coming when much of healthcare will be assumed by smart machines leveraging vast amounts of population and patient generated data to deliver personalized care. But as exciting as this is, the human connection between patients and their care teams remains critical in maximizing their potential. The melding of big data and the human experience is exactly where Twine is focused, and the team has already achieved results that are hard to ignore,” Khosla Ventures’ Vinod Khosla said in a prepared statement.

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