Jonathan Bush on Zus Health’s Big Pivot, Down Round, & “Masochistic Adoration” of Healthcare Life

“I'm starting to really have a masochistic adoration of really painful experiences in my healthcare life,” says Jonathan Bush as we talk about what it was like for the Founder & CEO to go through the process of closing Zus Health’s $40 million dollar Series B. What exactly happened to elicit this kind of reaction? We get the inside story on the fundraise, which many a health tech entrepreneur is likely to relate to, and, more importantly, dive deep into Zus’s BIG PIVOT.

That’s right. Zus has changed its positioning from the “'Build-a-Bear' of health tech stack components for digital health companies' to a source for single patient record data. “Zus is no longer a SaaS company,” explains Jonathan. “It's a DaaS company. It's just the data.”

The single-patient record is a health tech holy grail that many health technology companies are chasing, particularly with the support of data sharing rules from the 21st Century Cures Act (regardless of how well-adhered to they are just yet) and practical ‘how-to’ policy, like TEFCA, that provides guidelines for who, how, and why data can be shared safely. Jonathan says getting up-to-speed on a patient’s complete record can cost a provider as much as $30-$40 depending on specialty, and that the way most practices handle this now is by manually entering information (yes, typing it) into their EMR.

So, what’s Zus going to do differently? According to Jonathan, the key is that Zus’s complete record, the Zus Aggregated Profile (or ‘ZAP’ as it adorably referred to), doesn’t merge the individual records that it draws patient data from; it keeps the records separate to let the clinician decide what information is important. To help with that decision-making – and this is what Jonathan says has never been done before – a “summarization level” on top of the data provides a Tweet-length, at-a-glance overview of the records underneath it to quickly and easily make sense of what’s there. The clinician is “still in charge of the information [they] go forward with” and the records underneath are “living and breathing” and “fresh all the time” to make sure that the information is consistent, trustworthy, and reliable.

Zus has already announced several partnerships with EMR and CRM companies, most recently Elation Health, and hopes for more this year – maybe even one with JB’s former business, Athena Health, if I didn’t already accidentally spoil it for them! It’s nice to hear Jonathan talking about interoperability again, although he says there is “something different” about it these days. Tune in to find out what’s changed, and for Jonathan’s general take on the health tech market writ-large which begins, “Outrageous optimism and sloppy invention was a wonderful season, and we all enjoyed it. But in order for those inventions to take hold and dig in, we have to have a season of slaughter.”

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Jessica DaMassa, the emerging ‘It girl’ of health tech interviewing, chats it up with the ‘who’s who’ of the health tech and healthcare innovation set on 'WTF Health - What's the Future, Health?' Catch 100's of interviews with leading health tech startups and the VC investors, health insurance companies, big pharma co's, and hospital systems helping bring their new ideas into the healthcare establishment. From AI and Big Data to digital health, virtual care, telehealth, digital therapeutics, payment model innovation, and investing, Jessica helps you spot the trends and figure out what’s next.

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