Backing Junction: The data infrastructure for personalized healthcare

There is a ton of patient data available but it isn’t structured and often stored in different silos, transferred using outdated methods and inaccessible to clinicians. It’s incredible that with the technology we have at our fingertips, lab results are still regularly sent by fax! It’s estimated that one in five lab tests go incomplete, delaying patient care. It’s also common for doctors to have to switch between multiple systems during one patient consultation. 

I saw this firsthand in my time at Kry when building up the clinician operations. For an average patient, clinicians were switching between at least 5 different systems in order to see both past data as well as order labs and write prescriptions.

The proliferation of wearables from Oura rings to sleep trackers to glucose monitors means that there is more health-related data than ever before available. Data which can be hugely effective at predicting and preventing illness if it can be integrated with other data points and made actionable.

This is where Junction (formerly known at Vital) comes in. Junction’s mission is to power the future of personalized care through a unified health data platform that connects lab tests, wearables and medical devices through a single API. By integrating healthcare data and then providing an intelligence layer above it, Junction empowers clinicians to deliver personalized care to their patients. With the rise in AI, Junction’s infrastructure will be critical to enable clinical automations. 

Junction’s platform covers four main areas:

• Allows companies to order lab tests across all 50 states, and receive results from over 10+ labs, including Labcorp and Quest; through both in person and at-home-tests.

• Automates lab testing clinical workflows while minimising the manual work for clinical staff, enabling organizations to deliver care on time while reducing operational burden and costs.

• Keeps patients informed with real-time lab status updates and communication, reducing uncertainty and minimizing the need for patients to follow-up.

• Allows companies to connect to over 500 wearable and medical devices to create a comprehensive longitudinal view of patient health.

Since launching, Junction has seen incredible traction serving more than 140 healthcare organizations, including Found, Evidation, and Parsley Health. Across these organizations, they’ve supported over 2.5 million connected devices and more than 500,000 lab tests annually.

The opportunity for Junction is vast. With the quality of their existing product (as seen through customer traction) and ambition, they could become the data infrastructure for large healthcare organizations and payers. The global virtual healthcare market, estimated at $101.51 billion, is expected to grow to $455.3 billion by 2030, driven by a surge in demand for innovative, data-driven solutions (Research and Markets). As of 2020, up to $250 billion of U.S. healthcare spend could shift to virtual care (McKinsey).

Maitham left a very strong impression from our first call. Like many founders in health tech, he is driven by his personal experience as a patient having been severely ill as a child. He has a strong machine learning and engineering background, including a stint at Babylon Health, which he combines with commercial acumen. He’s assembled a crack team around him with a mission to help solve one of the biggest challenges facing society at the moment. We’re excited to join them on this journey.