TigerConnect, the Santa Monica, CA-based cloud-based clinical communication and collaboration platform provider has confirmed it has raised an additional $300 million in funding from the private equity firm Vista Equity Partners. Vista Equity Partners specializes in investing in enterprise software, data, and technology firms, and manages over $86 billion in assets. Under the investment deal, some of TigerConnect’s earlier investors have exited.

The TigerConnect platform is primarily a text-message-based solution that allows healthcare organizations to bring their communication systems into the 21st century and replace outdated methods of communication such as pagers, faxes, and email. The platform also supports voice and video calls and has proven invaluable during the pandemic to support the massive increase in telehealth services, while ensuring all communications are fully HIPAA-compliant.

When TigerConnect was formed in 2010 (as TigerText) there was no such thing as a universal communication and workflow platform for healthcare. “There had really been a dramatic lack of efforts around clinical workflow communication,” said Brad Brooks, TigerConnect co-founder, and chief executive. TigerConnect has solved that problem. “We’re almost like a Slack for healthcare, putting in a common communication network so that everyone can reach everyone,” said Brooks.

TigerConnect’s last round of funding in September 2020 resulted in an additional $45 million in investment being raised and in 2021, TigerConnect announced the acquisition of Call Scheduler and Critical Alert, which has helped the company enhance the platform and release new communication and collaboration solutions.

TigerConnect now offers physician scheduling and patient engagement solutions and has also expanded its middleware capabilities with a nurse alarm management and event notification solution. During the past year, TigerConnect doubled the number of users and now supports more than 700,000 caregivers across over 7,000 healthcare organizations. Last year, more than three billion clinical collaboration messages were exchanged and there were more than one million interactions with patients and their families using the platform.

Brooks confirmed the latest investment will be used for further product development to support the growing need for clinical collaborations. The company will also be exploring acquisition opportunities. “We believe that Vista’s expertise in partnering with founder-led and market-leading enterprise software businesses, coupled with our shared values, align strongly with our mission to provide advanced collaboration technologies that improve care delivery, said Brooks.”

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On Tuesday September 28, 2021, TigerConnect is hosting a webinar to demonstrate how healthcare providers can simplify the process of physician scheduling by using an automated, easily accessible, mobile-friendly physician scheduling solution.

Healthcare providers that have yet to fully automate physician scheduling typically rely on spreadsheets, printed sheets, and whiteboards for communicating physician schedules. Physician scheduling is therefore inefficient. It can be time consuming to find out about on-duty physicians and difficult to ensure fairness with on-call assignments and time-off requests.

During the webinar, attendees will learn about the TigerConnect Physician Scheduling solution and will discover how it can be used to streamline workflows, enable better coordination among care teams, and prevent burnout. The solution can be used to create rules-based daily to yearly on-call schedules, with the process typically taking around an hour. Schedules, tally reports and time-off approvals can be instantly communicated to staff members’ smartphones.

Webinar Details

Tuesday, September 28 at 1:00 p.m. ET / 10:00 a.m. PT

Hosted by:
Justin Wampach, TigerConnect Vice President, Scheduling
Angela Romero, TigerConnect Director, Professional Services

Register for the Webinar Here

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Healthcare providers have a wide range of incredibly advanced care tools at their disposal; however, many hospitals and clinics are still reliant on antiquated, unconnected communication systems. There have been major advances in communications technology in recent years which have been successfully implemented in many industry sectors to improve communication, collaboration, efficiency, and productivity, yet these have taken time to be introduced in the highly regulated healthcare industry. To this day, healthcare providers are still reliant on pagers, faxes, landline telephones, and white boards. These unconnected communication systems are inefficient and hamper healthcare workflows and ultimately significantly add to the cost of healthcare provision.

Over the past decade, new tools have come to market to replace these outdated and unconnected communication systems. Secure text messaging platforms have been developed for use in healthcare that greatly improve communication efficiently, while incorporating all the necessary safeguards to ensure the confidentiality, integrity, and availability of electronic protected health information to meet the requirements of HIPAA. Secure text messaging solutions for healthcare have evolved into comprehensive clinical communication and collaboration (CC&C) systems that integrate with a wide range of other systems, including EHRs, to meet the emerging needs that tomorrow’s network of interconnected healthcare organizations demands.

TigerConnect is the most adopted platform for advanced care team collaboration and clinical integrations in the United States and includes a suite of tools for improving efficiency throughout the healthcare continuum. This week, TigerConnect has announced it has significantly expanded and enhanced the TigerConnect portfolio to further improve efficiency, quality, outcomes, and the overall patient and provider experience.

“The newly enhanced TigerConnect portfolio empowers healthcare organizations of all sizes to solve complex workflows and communications scenarios from end to end, beginning with a significantly enhanced care collaboration platform,” explained TigerConnect “From there, enhancement technologies include simpler, more compassionate patient and family engagement options. Plus, improved alert and event notification and scheduling solutions help ensure hospitals already stretched thin with clinical staffing shortages do not compromise patient care and safety.”

The TigerConnect portfolio of HITRUST CSF-certified, HIPAA-compliant solutions includes TigerConnect Clinical Collaboration Platform, TigerConnect Alarm Management and Event Notifications, TigerConnect Patient Engagement, and TigerConnect Physician Scheduling.

At the heart of the suite is the CC&C platform that enables instant, secure communication between patients and clinicians, real-time delivery of results to caregivers, communication between teams, and more via text, voice, and video. The platform empowers staff to securely identify and communicate with colleagues across shifts, improving communication efficiency. Additionally, unanswered messages are automatically escalated, thus saving steps, accelerating care, and improving a wide range of organizational outcomes.

TigerConnect has expanded its middleware capabilities with Alarm Management and Event Notifications, which allow nurse teams to consume, prioritize and route contextualized alerts and alarm notifications from any nurse station, physiologic monitor, smart bed, or EHR vendor. “This improvement dramatically reduces unnecessary clinical interruptions, alarm fatigue, and sentinel events by separating the signal from the noise, helping to keep already lean nursing teams productive and less prone to burnout,” explained TigerConnect.

TigerConnect has also enhanced its platform for better patient engagement, which helps busy healthcare professionals bypass traditional outreach challenges, giving fast, easy, and direct access to patients and their families. The platform can be used to send appointment reminders, collect intake documents before a visit, provide patients families with updates during a procedure, conduct remote wound care follow-ups, and drive post-visit care plan adherence, with the solution providing itself to be invaluable for delivering telehealth services during the pandemic.

Through TigerConnect Physician Scheduling, the on-call and resident scheduling process has been automated, streamlined, and fused with clinical communications to ensure care teams know which doctor or physician’s assistant to contact at all times without having to consult printed schedules or whiteboards, and also share key details within a team of collaborators. This recently added feature ultimately streamlines time-off requests, shift swaps, and calendar access on a smartphone or desktop.

“Much as enterprise collaboration platforms have fundamentally transformed how businesses collaborate around people, data and integrations, TigerConnect is now revolutionizing healthcare collaboration,” said Brad Brooks, CEO and co-founder, TigerConnect. “Care organizations can communicate and collaborate securely and safely, while absolutely protecting patient privacy in the cloud. This revolution is just beginning as more healthcare data and integrations move to the cloud, and we are proud to be leading the way with platforms and solutions that will enable people and automate workflows.”

The post TigerConnect Announces Expansion of Clinical Communication and Collaboration Product Suite appeared first on HIPAA Journal.

TigerConnect is about to add a range of new capabilities to its clinical communication and collaboration platform following the acquisition of the healthcare middleware provider Critical Alert. This is the second major acquisition by the Santa Monica, CA-based HIPAA-compliant text messaging platform provider in 2020, following the acquisition of Call Scheduler in the fall.

Critical Alert is a cloud-native and mobile-first provider of enterprise-grade middleware for hospitals and health systems. The middleware products are used by hospitals to combine nurse call, alarm and event management, medical device interoperability, and clinical workflow analytics. In addition to the suite of middleware products, Critical Alert provides traditional nurse call hardware to more than 200 hospitals throughout North America.

The acquisition will see the suite of middleware products incorporated into the TigerConnect platform which will add a host of new capabilities and power a wide range of alert types and alarm management enhancements. The integration of the middleware is expected to be completed in Q1, 2021.

Critical Alert middleware seamlessly integrates clinical systems to transmit alarms, events, and values and provides virtualized nurse call that includes contextual patient data to allow nurses to prioritize requests. Through centralized answering of nurse call alerts and the management of workflows and assignments, noise and clinical interruptions are reduced and responsiveness is improved.

Real-time Location Systems (RTLS) integrations help to improve caregiver effectiveness and streamline workflows and enable real-time tracking of staff location and time spent on tasks. These integrations provide insights into resource planning, workflow effectiveness, and ongoing process improvement initiatives.

The integration of Critical Alert with TigerConnect will allow easy integrations with smart bed alarms for effective fall prevention and improved patient safety. If the safe bed configuration is compromised, alerts will be sent immediately to mobile devices allowing nurses to quickly respond.

Through an integration with the TigerFlow care team collaboration solution, alerts will be intelligently routed to the right caregivers, suppressing unnecessary noise and improving efficiency. The context provided with these alerts helps nurses to prioritize effectively. Critical Alert also brings advanced analytics that provide insights into patient behavior and help with the optimization of staff workload.

The incorporation of Critical Alert middleware into the TigerConnect platform provides greater value to customers and helps to ease the burden on nurses at a time when nurse burnout is incredibly common. The improvements that can be made to efficiency and effectiveness are likely to make a huge difference in hospitals, especially given the current chronic nurse shortages.

“We see the Critical Alert acquisition as highly strategic and a natural evolution of our already-robust collaboration platform,” said Brad Brooks, CEO and co-founder of TigerConnect. “For the hundreds of thousands of nurses that currently use TigerConnect, these new capabilities will deliver real-time, contextual information to their mobile device or desktop to allow them to work smarter, prioritize responses, and efficiently coordinate care, all within the same reliable TigerConnect platform they use every day for enterprise messaging.”

The acquisition will see Critical Alert CEO John Elms join the TigerConnect team as Chief Product Officer/ Elms will play a key role in integrating the two companies’ technologies and will guide future product offerings. The VP of Sales for Critical Alert, Wil Lukens, will also join the TigerConnect team and will assume the role of General Manager of Critical Alert’s traditional Nurse Call hardware unit, which will continue to operate under the same name as a standalone business unit.

“The timing of the deal and the fit of these two companies aligned perfectly,” said John Elms, CEO of Critical Alert. “Two best-in-class, highly complementary solutions coming together to solve some of the chronic challenges—alarm fatigue, response prioritization, resource optimization—that have driven nurse teams to the brink. Together, these unified technologies will make care professionals’ lives easier, not harder, and I couldn’t be more excited to lead the TigerConnect product organization into this next chapter.”

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