Bivarus, a health IT vendor that uses a cloud analytics platform to deliver insights on the patient experience for healthcare organizations to improve clinical performance, has raised $4 million in a Series B round, according to a news release. The funding will be used for product development in the area of natural language processing and to boost staff numbers.

Current investors in the Durham, North Carolina-based company supported the Series B. Hatteras Venture Partners led the round and other participants included Excelerate Health Ventures, NueCura Partners and Boston Millennia Partners. The fundraise follows a $2 million Series A round last year.

The company plans to use this most recent round of capital to continue expanding its customer base and enhancing its data visualizations and advanced analytics to help customers more easily identify insights and improve services. Additionally, Bivarus expects to hire approximately 10-15 new employees locally over the next year, according to the release.

In an email, Bivarus CEO David Levin specified some of the growth highlights of the past year. It added 40 new customers for a total of 150 hospitals, physician practices and surgery centers, such as Mission Regional, Butler Health, CEP America, and Tennessee Oncology.

“From a product standpoint, we’ve spent much of the past 12 months enhancing for scale,” Levin said. “We’ve grown the number of monthly survey encounters five-fold, and are now capturing patient-generated insights from over a million patients, and counting.”

The company also acquired Jackson Group, which participates in the Consumer Assessment of Healthcare Providers and Systems (CAHPS) program — a mandatory survey program for healthcare organizations. Bivarus has been keen to enter the CAHPS program so the acquisition delivered that.

Bivarus’s cloud-based analytics platform identifies service issues at their root cause, evaluates provider performance and tracks quality improvement efforts instantly, rather than in hindsight, Levin noted.

Levin added in the email that Bivarus has several product partnerships focused on natural language processing of patient comments, social media and review sites, and the merit-based incentive payment system, (MIPS) reporting that it plans to announce later this year.

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