ixlayer Platform Addresses Healthcare Providers Medical Testing Ills

One of the obvious sectors that has seen explosive growth during the pandemic has been telehealth, in which doctors are able to continue caring for their patients while reducing overall exposure to the virus.

Companies providing virtual doctor access such as 98point6 have seen huge growth and infusions of investor cash. Not only has the sudden growth of telehealth boosted companies directly offering digital doctor visits, but it has reverberated out to other supporting and ancillary businesses, which are also lifted by the rising tide of remote healthcare.

One such business is ixlayer, which provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) hub that connects patients, doctors and institutions around medical testing. The company, which saw early success with clients including the U.S. Coast Guard and Stanford University, has just raised $75 million in Series A funding round led by General Catalyst. As Co-Founder and Chief Operating Officer Poorya Sabounchi told PYMNTS, ixlayer is solving for the exponential complexity of medical testing.

But first, some background.

The company lies at the nexus of doctors, researchers, patients and medical facilities like hospitals. Sabounchi described the company’s model as B2B to C. He said ixlayer is striving to bring the ease of online deployment that’s a hallmark of eCommerce provider Shopify along with the “anyone can play” versatility of payments platform Stripe.

The company came about after ixlayer’s co-founder saw a gap in the market.

“When a company wanted to offer new digital forms of diagnostic testing, they had to go through a very lengthy process of building the software stack,” Sabounchi said. “Our experience showed that each company needed to spend between 18 to 24 months of development activity to just build something internally for themselves because software development is not really the core of those companies.”

So instead of companies having to deal with developing their own software, ixlayer provides them with an off-the-shelf SaaS solution that they can simply scale.

As an example of how the company operates, Sabounchi pointed to its work with Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston and CIC Health, a COVID-19 testing and vaccination provider. During the height of the pandemic, Mass General outsourced all COVID-19 testing to CIC, which was using the ixlayer platform. This allowed doctors at the hospital to instantly get alerted when a patient tested positive, which dramatically reduced outbreaks at the hospital, he said.

Search And Serve

In addition to facilitating this type of connection, ixlayer can also be used as a “search and serve” utility whereby, for example, a pharma company receives approval for a new drug that treats rare diseases and could use the platform to find, through testing, patients for whom the drug would be beneficial. Furthermore, ixlayer facilitates a top-down view of the entire medical testing system, which can aid research efforts such as clinical trials, Sabounchi said.

“Patients not only get their test data immediately but also someone on the enterprise level has oversight of all the different clinics that are going through the testing,” he said. “Furthermore, the value is that each clinic has its own silo of data and patients. So, if you are a part of a parent organization, there may be 10 different sub-organizations beneath you, each seeing only their own patients. With this system, the parent organization doesn’t really need to see patients. So, if you’re a clinic in San Diego, you don’t really need to see patients in a clinic in New Jersey or vice versa.”

An Agnostic Future

In terms of ixlayer’s future and its new infusion of cash, Sabounchi said the company will continue to build the utility of its platform and begin to explore different testing mechanisms, such as mobile and home testing services. At its core, ixlayer’s value lies in its applications programming interface (API) integrations, which it plans to continue to improve and expand. By doing so, not only can other companies jump on its platform, but existing customers will be able to expand the ways in which they use it as well.

And, while COVID-19 might have brought more attention — and funds — to ixlayer, Sabounchi said that the diseases for which companies are seeking solutions do not really affect its business model, and it can therefore grow in any environment.

“We are agnostic to the test,” he said. “We are agnostic to the disease and to the way the testing is being done. We are trying to be pulled by markets. So, we’re not pushing in one direction versus another, we’re just letting the market take us to the new horizon and new directions where there’s more utility.”