Osmind raises $40 million to expand electronic records for mental health

As the country continues to grapple with a mental health crisis that has only been exacerbated by the pandemic, electronic medical record startup Osmind has some rare good news: The San Francisco-based company announced a Series B round on Tuesday. of $40 million, which it says will enable more hiring and critical product improvements.

Osmind provides software to track and update patient information and documents, with a focus on mental health. “Right now, what’s happening is these health care providers are basically using pen and paper. [to chart patient data and treatment details]or they are using software that was developed in the 2000s,” says Osmind CEO and co-founder Lucia Huang.

The company has two main objectives, which work together. At one end of the pipeline, electronic health record (EHR) software can collect highly granular data. Patients can use the platform to provide real-time reports on how they feel and what they think, giving doctors a much clearer picture of their patients’ well-being between visits. Then, on the back end, Osmind is creating a dataset that researchers studying drugs or other interventions can query, dissect, and analyze.

The use of EHRs for research is not a new concept by any means; companies like flat health and of the alphabet Actually have been tapping into troves of digitized patient data to gain insights into drug designs and therapies for diseases, ranging from cancer to heart disease. But Osmind is leading the race to bring this idea to the realm of mental health. In March of this year, the company partnered with Stanford University School of Medicine to publish the largest real-world analysis ever conducted on ketamine as a treatment for depression.

Osmind’s last round of raises was led by DFJ Growth, a growth-stage venture capital firm based in the Bay Area. Osmind says the money will be used to double his team to around 100 employees and expand the types of data the software can capture. “A lot of that [money] it will continue to address the core development of EHR and enhancing additional clinical use cases, helping providers record each type of treatment they are doing, having additional questionnaires for different types of patients with different mental health diagnoses,” says Huang. “We’re also thinking a lot about that piece of research. . . How does someone with this gender versus this condition versus this BMI respond to certain treatments?”

The time for the inflow of new money could not be more pressing. Last month, the World Health Organization (WHO) announced that rates of anxiety and depression increased 25% during the first year of the pandemic. To make matters worse, the demand for therapy has quickly outstripped the supply of qualified providers, leaving many patients facing long wait times. Teenagers have been particularly affected, and the Surgeon General has called out the mental health challenges facing young people “unprecedented” and “devastating”.

“Everyone knows that mental health care is a big deal in this country right now, but that’s especially the case for the 15 million Americans who have tried multiple lines of therapy and treatment without success,” Huang says. . “Our platform is really focused on helping the health care providers who care for them and also generating new evidence for future research and future treatments.”

Huang met his co-founder, Jimmy Qian, at Stanford, and the idea for Osmind was born out of a shared frustration with the mental health system. The couple bonded over their similar upbringings in the Bay Area and in Asian-American homes, where Huang says mental health remains highly stigmatized. “It was really something that brought us together and made us want to do something about it,” she says. With the help of Stanford faculty, Huang and Qian applied, and were accepted, to the Y Combinator incubator in 2020. Around the same time, Huang finished his business degree and Qian dropped out of medical school to work at Osmind in time. complete.

This week’s Series B brings the company’s total funding to $57 million. Osmind is a public benefit corporation (PBC) which, should the company go public, relieves its corporate officers of some of the fiduciary responsibilities to shareholders and instead requires the corporation consider profits along with the mandate to create a public benefit. in an environmentally friendly way.

The distinction may seem trivial, but for Huang it is a source of pride and proof that Osmind is about more than just making money. “We are trying to connect all these pieces to move forward [to create] better treatments and a better psychiatric outlook in general,” she says.