AxiaMed Secures $12.4M Funding to Expand Integrated, Secure Patient Payment Solutions for Healthcare Providers

VCBeat (WeChat: vcbeat)According to Business Wire, AxiaMed, an innovative healthcare payment technology company, announced today that it has raised $12.4 million in funding. The proceeds from this financing round will enable AxiaMed to expand its product development and market strategy, strengthen its core team, consolidate its market position, and accelerate its growth in the emerging market for secure and flexible patient payment solutions. The round was led by HEP (Health Enterprise Partners). Previously, AxiaMed completed a $3.4 million angel funding round on July 19, 2017.

As healthcare costs continue to soar, a greater share of financial responsibility is shifting from payers to patients. Industry analysts predict that patient out-of-pocket payments will account for more than 30% of total healthcare expenditures in 2019 and rise to nearly 50% within five years. Healthcare providers have been slow to adapt to this shift. Apart from collecting copayments at the point of service, they lack appropriate processes or systems to directly manage collections from consumers.

Worse still, healthcare providers lack experience in handling the complexities of payment card processing and are uncertain about how best to mitigate security and compliance risks. To address this pain point, AxiaMed, a healthcare fintech company focused on payment security, was established.

Since its founding in 2015, AxiaMed has achieved triple-digit annual growth, driven by the sharp increase in patients’ financial responsibility for medical costs. By partnering with independent software vendors (ISVs) to integrate secure patient payment solutions into their healthcare applications, AxiaMed’s comprehensive suite of products helps improve healthcare providers’ financial performance and facilitates patient payments by expanding available payment options, streamlining administrative workflows, and reducing bad debt.

Specifically, the safety of AxiaMed is reflected in the following five aspects:

Validated P2PE

Payment Fusion was listed as a validated point-to-point encryption (vP2PE) solution in September 2017. Its unique network architecture and customized software for Ingenico payment terminals support secure transaction processing using vP2PE.

As a PCI P2PE solution, Payment Fusion delivers state-of-the-art security for instant payment card transactions, supported by best practices that safeguard key management integrity and eliminate opportunities for device tampering within the supply chain. Payment Fusion’s Control Center helps large end-users easily maintain ongoing vP2PE compliance by tracking and managing all payment terminals deployed across their organizations.

Symbolization

AxiaMed’s Secure Payment Vault provides our partners and customers with a secure database for storing payment data in files, commonly referred to as “card-on-file.”

By replacing card numbers with “tokens” (e.g., random strings of digits and letters), AxiaMed substitutes sensitive card information with non-sensitive equivalents. These tokens are then used in place of actual credit card numbers within software applications to maximize the security of online and mobile payments, while enabling features such as recurring billing and payment plans.

PCI Compliance

For software vendors, AxiaMed’s cloud-based semi-integrated solution eliminates applications from the scope of PA-DSS. Its architecture enables customers to fully segregate transaction data from other network traffic, thereby reducing the cost and complexity of PCI audits.

HIPAA Compliance

AxiaMed complies with HIPAA security and privacy requirements for protecting Protected Health Information (PHI), conducts regular security risk assessments, performs vulnerability scanning, and carries out application security audits.

EMV

Payment Fusion has been certified for use with Ingenico EMV-enabled terminals from AxiaMed. EMV is the global standard for payment cards embedded with computer chips, as well as the technology used to authenticate chip card transactions. EMV significantly reduces bank card fraud resulting from counterfeit, lost, and stolen cards.

After nearly three years of development, its Payment Fusion platform has become the preferred SaaS-based payment platform in the healthcare industry, adopted by hundreds of hospitals and thousands of mobile providers. Payment Fusion enables healthcare software vendors to integrate secure payment technologies into AxiaMed’s applications, reducing the risk of payment data breaches and easing compliance burdens, while improving providers’ financial performance by expanding the payment options available to patients.

“We are delighted to partner with Health Enterprise Partners and its extensive network of healthcare industry collaborators. This investment further validates the importance of AxiaMed’s solutions and underscores the necessity for healthcare organizations and software solution providers to adopt secure patient payment technologies,” said Randal Clark, CEO and Co-Founder of AxiaMed. “We look forward to significantly enhancing our execution capabilities through these additional resources.”

“While many other healthcare payment companies focus on point solutions, AxiaMed’s innovative payment platform enables and enhances secure patient payment solutions across a wide range of healthcare software platforms,” said Ezra Mehlman, Head of Health Enterprise Partners. “AxiaMed’s remarkable growth trajectory and strong customer demand have positioned the company as a market leader, particularly excelling in the security segment of healthcare payments and revenue cycle technology.”

Kevin Kidd, Co-founder and CEO of AxiaMed, as well as its Business Development Officer, stated, “HEP’s extensive experience in the healthcare market will help us accelerate the expansion of our payment integration platform with healthcare organizations and software partners, significantly improving the payment experience for providers and payers.”

Over the past year, AxiaMed has become one of the first providers of Point-to-Point Encryption (vP2PE) solutions validated for PCI compliance with a focus on healthcare. This security product enables AxiaMed’s software partners and healthcare organizations to strengthen their security infrastructure and reduce PCI compliance requirements and associated costs.

AxiaMed is a healthcare financial technology company focused on payment integration and security. Its comprehensive payment technology platform, Payment Fusion, enhances the financial performance of healthcare providers by integrating with various revenue cycle, practice management, EHR, and other software systems, thereby improving interoperability and expanding payment options across the entire healthcare payment ecosystem among patients, healthcare providers, and payers.

AxiaMed is headquartered in Santa Barbara, California, with an executive office in Nashville, Tennessee.

HEP (Healthcare Enterprise Partners) primarily invests in healthcare services and healthcare information technology companies within the private middle market. At the core of HEP’s strategy is its unique and extensive network of hospital systems and health plans, 36 members of which are investors in HEP funds. HEP seeks to invest in companies that enhance the quality of patient experience, expand access to care, and reduce healthcare costs.