Our Investment in Morf: A Patient Data Platform for Healthcare

An interview Q&A with Morf CEO Montana Scher

Morf Health, which is building a patient data platform for healthcare, announced their $3 million seed financing led by Kindred Ventures. Founded by Montana Scher and James Thompson, Morf is an integration platform that allows healthcare providers to sync patient data and build custom workflow automations across their tools — eliminating tedious manual processes and empowering them to focus on patient care as they grow. You can read more about their seed round, early customers, and their vision for the company directly from the founders’ blog here.

Morf is a patient data platform for healthcare. Isn’t that what an EHR does?

Great question. While both Morf and EHRs deal with patient data, they serve different purposes. EHRs historically were built to manage medical records for billing. More modern EHRs are focused on helping providers manage patient care. Morf, on the other hand, manages the collection, reconciliation, and activation of patient data across a provider’s entire tech stack.

Morf’s customers are healthcare providers who use many tools in addition to an EHR to effectively deliver care and run their business. As an integration platform, Morf ensures all of those tools, including the EHR, talk to each other, are in sync, as Morf unifies that data.

With this foundation, admins are able to automate processes such that updates to data in one tool can trigger an action to happen in a downstream tool. For example, when a patient submits a signup form via a website, Morf receives that data and creates a structured patient record in an EHR from that data.

An EHR still remains a provider’s repository for medical records. Morf, on the other hand, makes an EHR more powerful by allowing it to work seamlessly with complementary tools and ensuring it has a comprehensive, up-to-date view of a patient.

In the last 10 years, there has been a massive proliferation of digital health providers. What, exactly, is a digital health provider, and why should patients care?

If patients want more convenient, seamless, and in some cases, more effective care, they should consider digital health providers. These providers use technology to improve the patient experience in a meaningful way, making tasks like finding a practitioner, booking appointments, managing prescriptions, conducting lab tests, or handling billing more seamless and delightful. The digital health providers we are really excited about are driven by a unique insight into how technology can improve the effectiveness and accessibility of a care model and, therefore, health outcomes.

We believe that convenient, delightful digital experiences are going to be essential for the next generation of healthcare providers. We have witnessed how software can disrupt the retail and finance sectors for both consumers and businesses. However, in the healthcare industry, we are still in the early stages, and there are many opportunities waiting to be explored and addressed.

You’ve both been part of a digital health provider with Parsley, but also have experience in financial services. Can we talk about the operational differences within digital health versus at a company like Square or Earnest research?

Both are very operational-heavy industries. And both, in many ways, turn into an operational efficiency game — how can we deliver value and address our customers’ needs with as little tedious, manual work required so we can best leverage our team and reduce margins? Doing this effectively requires being able to collect, structure, and unify data so that it can be used to automate processes.

One major difference between healthcare and financial services is that healthcare often centers around a practitioner-patient relationship. Our target customers are in mental and behavioral health, nutrition, preventative health, and chronic disease management. These are specialities where there is a long-term relationship between a patient and provider, and tracking patient progress is important. So operationally, it’s about figuring out how to allow practitioners to do what they do best, how to allow for the human element that we know is essential, while allowing technology to take care of the rest.

In healthcare, there will always be a very important human “in-the-loop” for many specialties. In financial services, that’s less true.

What about the low-tech health providers? It seems like they may need something like this even more urgently than the digital providers. Why start with the digital, and how do you expand from there?

We actually have already started talking to and working with lower-tech health providers. While they aren’t focused on a digital patient experience, they do feel the pain of the tremendous amount of admin work required to run a healthcare practice. Streamlining this admin work and improving internal operations often results in a more seamless patient experience. Morf can help facilitate the internal flow of data, automating processes across tools used by clinical, admin, and business teams to eliminate tedious tasks and allow providers to focus on care.

We started primarily with the digital providers, mostly startups, because they allowed us to build the most streamlined MVP and get it to market. As startups themselves, they are more willing to experiment and work with us as we hammer out the details of our product. But, as we build more integrations and self-service functionality, we’ll have an offering that can meet lower-tech provider needs off the shelf. This is a focus for 2024.

Let’s talk about surprises — what’s been the most unpleasant surprise so far in building out Morf, and of course what’s been the most pleasant?

Many of the “modern” healthcare tools we integrate with don’t have especially friendly APIs. APIs are always secondary for these companies, and for good reason. These companies need to prioritize the actual functionality and interfaces that their customers use to get their primary job done. So while these APIs are much better than HL7 feeds, it still requires quite a bit of effort and know-how to get everything working properly. Of course, that’s the schlep we signed up for, and the pain we are addressing on behalf of our customers.

The most pleasant surprise has been how enthusiastic our customers have been about working with us in these early stages. It’s clear we’re solving a real problem for them, and our customers have been incredibly open, generous with their time, and willing to work with us as partners. We have a common mission — bringing healthcare into the 21st century and using technology to improve patient outcomes — and that makes working together rewarding.