CHOP spinout Bainbridge Health raises $1.6 million to expand mission, team

Bainbridge Health CEO Joseph Kaupp makes this analogy to explain his company’s renewed focus: If the platform they’ve been working on so far was just Microsoft Word, they’re now bringing to market the full Microsoft Office suite.

Founded in 2016 as a spinout from the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP), the first move from the company was a medication management software platform using data from infusion pumps to ensure applications were error-proof.

Now — backed by an infusion of $1.6 million from BioAdvance, CHOP, Chestnut Street Ventures and private investors — Bainbridge is working on the expansion of its platform, one that seeks to combat a leading cause of death in the country: medical errors. All told, the company has raised a $3.5 million seed round split up in different tranches.

“We’re providing a panoptic solution for medical centers to identify hazardous practices and help them fix that,” said Kaupp.

What that means is the platform also aggregates data from different source including infusion pumps and electronic health records (EHRs) with the end goal of understanding where risky practices are happening in hospital settings and using data to make improvements.

(Here’s what Kaupp learned from the company’s first year in operation.)

Currently a team of seven full-timers, the company is looking to bring aboard another three employees in the short term and more positions in 2019. In an era where data is king, Bainbridge is sitting on data from 40 million medication applications, which help drive the insights they can offer their clients: a dozen or so in-patient hospitals and another couple dozen out-patient facilities.

Kaupp declined to mention any client names, but earlier this year the company announced in a press release that leading medical school University of California, San Francisco had signed on as a client. Traction in the market, Kaupp said, has been a big relief amid the uncertainties of entrepreneurship.

“It’s a great feeling,” the CEO said. “In the past two years having brand-name enterprises use our platform and have investors show confidence and trust in what we do means a lot. I’m really touched.”