DENVER, Colo. – June 26, 2024 – Hummingbird Healthcare Inc. successfully closed a $10 million Series A funding round led by UCHealth. Hummingbird is a tech-enabled managed services company focused on elevating patient access to healthcare and creating good jobs. With this investment, Hummingbird and its clients will expand their work maturing patient access so providers can focus on caring for patients and patients can access care how, where, and when they need it.
“In the U.S. we’ve invested more than $70 billion in digital health in the past five years ¹. And today, only about 6% of appointments are made online. Technology alone can’t solve our access problems,” said Jeremy Schwach, Hummingbird’s CEO. “As a result, we’re focused on partnering with healthcare organizations to do the hard work under the hood to truly unlock the power of new technologies, automation, and AI.”
Focused on maximizing core technologies like Epic, Hummingbird helps clients standardize primary care and specialty patient access services into integrated contact centers, improve contact center operations, and optimize Epic.
“We help our clients build a strong Epic and patient access foundation to drive patient self-service and automate in ways that also make providers’ lives easier.” said Schwach. “By expanding this work to more clients, we’ll move the needle on access across healthcare.”
UCHealth, an innovative, Colorado-based nonprofit health system, led the round, expanding on their investment in Hummingbird’s seed funding round. UCHealth is also a strategic client partner of Hummingbird working to further assess and improve key areas of their patient access operations.
“Healthcare needs to do better at creating a more seamless and integrated experience for our patients before, during, and after their care,” said Steve Hess, UCHealth’s CIO. “With Hummingbird, we have a partner who understands both how to identify gaps and to make the necessary adjustments to operate more efficiently and effectively for our patients and staff. We continue to unlock enormous potential from our digital platforms by making people, process, and technology changes, and see no reason why our learnings can’t be implemented at other world-class health systems.”
Joining UCHealth in this round of investment is a diverse set of investors composed of industry veterans and strategic investors focused on investing in social change. This group includes the CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, 8VC, and Gaingels.
ABOUT HUMMINGBIRD HEALTHCARE AND OUR INVESTMENT PARTNERS
Hummingbird is a healthcare managed services company that specializes in patient access, including appointment scheduling, registration, insurance verification, authorizations and referrals, nurse triage, and prescription management. Their goal is to reduce the $30 billion health systems spend every year answering phone calls by managing patient access as a technology-enabled service to provide patients with the responsive, personalized experience they’ve come to expect in other industries. Hummingbird also focuses on creating good jobs that attract and keep talent in healthcare. As a member of the Good Jobs Institute, Hummingbird’s operating philosophy is rooted in the Good Jobs Strategy, where paying front-line team members living wages, investing in learning and development, and committing to internal mobility are keys to enduring success.
UCHealth is an innovative, nonprofit health system that delivers the highest quality medical care with an excellent patient experience. UCHealth includes 33,000 employees, 14 acute-care hospitals, and hundreds of physicians across Colorado, southern Wyoming, and western Nebraska. With University of Colorado Hospital on the CU Anschutz Medical Campus as its academic anchor and the only adult academic medical center in the region, UCHealth is dedicated to providing unmatched patient care in the Rocky Mountain West. Offering more than 200 clinic locations, UCHealth provides extensive community benefits and pushes the boundaries of medicine through advanced treatments and clinical trials, improving health through innovation.
Contact:
Justin Jozwik
Head of Growth
608.332.8782
justin@hummingbird.healthcare
¹Rock Health Digital Health Funding Database, data through December 31, 2023.