Viewics orders up $8M to help control hospital lab test costs

The government and, increasingly, commercial insurers, are reimbursing health systems for caring for patient populations based on the value of care given, not on the amount of care given. So hospitals and clinics are hell-bent on finding ways to cut costs, and lab tests are seen as one of the biggest culprits for waste.

A startup called Viewics hopes to cut that waste with an analytics platform that gives doctors, administrators, and lab managers a clear look at the cost and real diagnostic value of the tests being ordered. Studying and understanding this, the thinking goes, might change test ordering habits for the better.

The Sunnyvale, Calif.-based company said today that it has secured a new $8 million in funding in a round led by Canvas Venture Fund. It will use the money to further develop its platform and expand sales and marketing efforts, Canvas general partner Rebecca Lynn told VentureBeat Tuesday.

“Our data aggregation technology has become integral to our customers, with over 80 percent of them significantly expanding on their initial scope within months of use,” said Viewics CEO and founder Dhiren Bhatia in a statement.

The platform can even suggest tests to doctors based on the types of tests typically ordered for diagnosing a particular disease, Canvas’s Lynn told VentureBeat.

Lynn explains that the Viewics platform pulls data from a lab’s clinical systems and a hospital’s customer relationship management, electronic health record, and cost accounting systems. The Viewics platform stores clinical, financial, and operational analysis data on 650 million tests, the company said.

(Integration with the electronic health record is one of the key topics we’ll be discussing at VentureBeat’s HealthBeat conference October 27-28.)

Viewics has already sold its software-as-a-service platform to more than 100 hospitals and labs as well as a good number of lab management companies.

Here’s the Viewics overview video: