Elaborate, a startup that helps health practitioners share and contextualize lab results with patients, raised a $10 million seed fund led by Tusk Venture Partners, the firm tells Fast Company.
Founded in 2021, Elaborate integrates within more than 65 existing electronic medical record systems to send patients their test results along with any context or insights that might alleviate anxiety seemingly inherent to instant lab results.
“I was seeing doctors spending hours every week, sometimes hours every night, just responding to panicked patient emails or spending hours writing up free summaries of the report to accompany it so they wouldn’t have all this panic,” says Nicole Bocskocsky, CEO and founder of Elaborate.
“There’s this big problem and it’s causing a lot of angst on the patient side, a lot of confusion,” adds Bocskocsky, who spent the majority of her career in the health tech space, including stints at Oscar and Parsley Health. “And then on the doctors’ side, as a result, there’s a lot of wasted time. Increasingly, with the physician shortage, this is like one of the biggest problems that we see in healthcare.”
Bocskocsky points to the negative impacts of the 21st Century Cures Act, a law that now requires practices to immediately supply patients with the electronic release of all medical records, including test results. “It’s great for patients, but the reason why clinicians are so nervous about this is because it just elevates that patient panic, it increases the burden of work for them, and the burnout gets just worse and worse and worse over time,” she says.
Her goal with Elaborate is to help cut down the load of doctors’ administrative tasks. The company claims that doctors reduce their administrative workload by an average of 32 minutes per day with the system.
Once lab work comes in, Elaborate will contextualize the results based on the doctor’s guidance. For example, if a patient gets results that include clinically significant findings, the company will provide a “panic reducing summary” of what those numbers actually mean and whether there are any observable trends. “This helps you and your doctor understand what’s actually happening across your compendium of data,” says Bocskocsky, stressing that the platform itself doesn’t diagnose.
Elaborate will highlight findings that have stayed consistent or should be celebrated as well. The doctor, at the same time, can provide a note and can communicate directly with patients regarding next steps. Sometimes next steps are to do nothing, while other times it means a follow-up visit. Users can schedule both in-person and telehealth follow-ups directly within the app.
“We’re not replacing the doctor and making these recommendations. We’re just communicating them more effectively and augmenting, kind of, their workflow,” Bocskocsky adds.
Elaborate covers 500,000 patients to date via its current providers and plans to expand to 2 million covered by the end of this year by closing new partnerships with provider groups and health systems. The company, which has clients in a handful of states right now, isn’t restricted by certain regulatory or licensing concerns because it isn’t delivering medical care, but rather partnering with doctors who provide the care.
“The majority of our clients tend to be on the coasts at the moment, because our team happens to be on the coast at the moment,” Bocskocsky says. “And as we expand that team presence, then we’ll start to expand to other territories naturally.”
That’s where the funding comes in. Bocskocsky says the seed round will allow Elaborate to deepen its integration capabilities with EMRs, such as Epic, as well as refine its enterprise offering to be more “deeply embedded in the practitioners’ workflow in the EMR, allowing us to deliver a more streamlined implementation and solution for practitioners at bigger systems,” she says. That, of course, comes with allocating funds for hiring and marketing.
Jordan Nof, cofounder and managing partner of Tusk Venture Partners, is set to join Elaborate’s board of directors. Other participants in the round include Founder Collective, Company Ventures, Bling Ventures, and Arkitekt Ventures. PillPack cofounder Elliot Cohen, Oscar’s former chief product officer Sara Wajnberg, and Scott Belsky, Adobe’s chief product officer, also invested in the startup.
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