PicnicHealth, a startup that helps patients access and share their medical records, raked in $25 million in new Series B funding round led by Felicis Ventures. 

This comes roughly two years after the California company raised $10 million in its Series A round. 

As part of the new deal Sundeep Peechu, managing director at Felicis Ventures will take a seat on PicnicHealth’s board of directors. 

WHAT THEY DO 

The company got its start by helping to democratize patients' health records. The service is able to capture and digitize a patient’s medical records, including visits to the doctors, lab results and medications. Patients are able to look at medical trends and changes over time. Additionally, the system lets patients see scans from their phone and share their health information with a provider or loved one. 

The company also lets patients share their information with researchers. In fact, the company recently inked a deal with Roche subsidiary Genentech that will provide the pharmaceutical company access to PicnicHealth’s set of de-identified patient records in order to gain insights about certain disease and treatments. Patients need to opt into this program and consent. 

WHAT IT’S FOR 

The company said that the new funds will be put towards new medical research that is based on real-world data that it captures from its users. 

“PicnicHealth stands alone in the real-world evidence market by providing transformative value to patients with chronic conditions and to researchers working on cutting-edge treatments,” Sunil Dhaliwal, general partner of Amplify Partners, said in a statement. “We were thrilled to partner with the founders early in their journey, and are equally excited to partner once again in support of their explosive growth.”

MARKET SNAPSHOT 

Connecting health records has notoriously been a struggle in healthcare. However, several efforts, including the federal one, have looked to address this issue. 

For example, last year CMS unveiled a new pilot program dubbed “Data at the Point of Care” (DPC), which employs an API to help give providers access to their patient’s medical data. The pilot was part of a larger program called MyHealthEData, which was focused on giving patients more access to their medical data. 

Another effort in this space is Apple Health, which aggregates existing patient-generated data in a user's Health app with data from their EHR – if the user is a patient at a participating hospital.