Bright.md raises $1M for remote primary care platform

The investment money continues to roll into the virtual and mobile care space. In the U.S. we now spend about $150 billion a year to treat simple primary care health problems, and many of those problems don’t require the hands-on attention of a physician.

Many of the telemedicine startups we’ve seen sell their service directly to consumers, but Portland, Oregon-based Bright.md offers a technology platform that medical groups can use to care for some types of patients remotely.

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The company today announced that it has closed a $1 million funding round led by Seven Peaks Ventures, with Portland Seed Fund and Oregon Angel Fund also throwing in. The new funds will be used to further develop the company’s telemedicine platform.

(Bright.md will be presenting its product on stage at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference October 28.)

Bright.md’s platform, SmartExam, connects patients to their physicians via a home computer or mobile device. They use the platform to input their insurance information and answer questions about their symptoms.

Then, on the other end, doctors use the platform to treat a patient (if the problem is non-complex), document the visit, generate a summary of care for the patient, write prescriptions, and schedule a follow-up visit if needed.

The SmartExam platform can automate up to 60 percent of a primary care practice’s visit volume, Bright.md claims, and can reduce the time providers need for those visits from 20 minutes down to less than two minutes (the time it takes to review the symptoms and write a prescription, in the simplest scenario).

“For patients today, the inability to get timely access to affordable primary care is a fundamental problem,” said Bright.md CEO Ray Costantini, MD, in a statement. “Bright.md is the only solution I am aware of that provides this type of value to existing delivery systems, helping patients get care from the physicians they already know and trust.”

Bright.md was founded in January 2014.