PatientIQ raises $20 million

A Chicago health tech startup building software to monitor patient feedback has closed on $20 million from investors.

PatientIQ, founded in 2016, makes enterprise software for healthcare providers that quantifies patient outcomes by collecting personal feedback from patients, said co-founder and CEO Matthew Gitelis.

The software integrates into electronic health records, and logs feedback directly from patients via surveys before and after treatments, surgeries and other procedures. Capturing data before and after treatments allows providers to gain insight into how effective their treatments are for patients, Gitelis says.

“It’s really meant to be another piece of data for the providers to have at their fingertips to calibrate the care they’re providing to a patient,” Gitelis says.

The startup has more than 200 healthcare provider clients, including the University of Missouri Health Care, Midwest Orthopedics at Rush, the Illinois Bone & Joint Institute, Stanford Medicine and the University of Colorado Medicine. Across its clients, PatientIQ says it reaches more than 2 million patients.

The software is sold on a subscription basis. Gitelis declined to say how much it costs but that it varies depending on the size of a medical system.

Gitelis, who holds a finance degree from the University of Illinois, has a background working in the financial sector, first at the Chicago Board of Trade and later as an analyst at BMO Capital Markets. In his early 20s, Gitelis was looking for a career pivot and decided to go into healthcare. He attended Northwestern University to complete prerequisites for medical school and eventually began a program at Rush Medical College. Shortly after, Gitelis founded PatientIQ and later dropped out of medical school.

“When I was transitioning from the finance world to the healthcare world, I quickly became aware that the software we had available in the financial sector . . . it was lacking in healthcare,” Gitelis said. “I felt that doctors and nurses and other healthcare professionals deserved the same advanced tools that we had in finance.”

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Gitelis declined to disclose specific revenue figures for PatientIQ but said that sales grew 300% year over year in 2021. He anticipates a similar growth rate this year. PatientIQ is not yet profitable and is instead “choosing to reinvest in growth.”

The new funding will be used to help PatientIQ expand its software to new medical centers and hire employees. PatientIQ currently employs 50 people but aims to have about 85 workers by the end of the year. The startup, which has offices in River North, is hiring for product and engineering roles.

Today’s new funding brings PatientIQ’s total financing raised to about $28 million, Gitelis says. Investors include New York’s Health Enterprise Partners and Menlo Park, Calif.-based August Capital. HEP Managing Partner Dave Tamburri is joining PatientIQ's board of directors.

PatientIQ is among several healthcare startups in Chicago raising venture capital this year. Drug pricing startup OptumRx raised $35 million last month, cancer detection company CancerIQ raised $14 million in March and wearable-technology startup Epicore Biosystems raised $10 million in February.

This story first appeared in our sister publication, Crain's Chicago Business.