Seattle startup BloomAPI helps health clinics phase out faxes

Fax machines have been largely phased out of many offices, but health clinics still rely on them. One Seattle startup wants to change that and help clinics modernize how they electronically share medical records.

BloomAPI, founded by Seattle entrepreneur Michael Wasser, develops technology that lets doctors send medical records directly from one computer system to another — no faxing required.

The startup, which has five employees in Seattle’s Belltown, raised $2.4 million last week in a seed round of funding from investors including Y-Combinator and local firm Founders Co-op.

Wasser decided to focus his attention on the health-care industry after he sold his previous software company, Raveld, to Apptio. He got a sense of the industry and realized a key communication link was missing. Many electronic medical-record systems don’t talk to each other, forcing offices to resort to faxes.

“Faxes tend to be really error-prone,” Wasser said. “A lot of times they don’t actually make it to the person who is meant to receive the record.”

BloomAPI’s technology works as an intermediary between doctors’ health-care computer systems. The startup ensures that each office has the appropriate privacy permissions to send and receive records and that the records are transferred seamlessly from one system to another. Records appear directly in whichever electronic medical record-system the receiving clinic uses.

“We have a piece of software installed in doctors’ offices that can connect to virtually any records system,” Wasser said.

All of BloomAPI’s employees receive specialized training to keep them up-to-date on current health-care privacy rules and regulations.

BloomAPI, which officially launched about eight months ago, works with 300 doctors across the country.

Wasser said the startup plans to use its recent round of funding to hire engineers and sales employees to keep up with the demand from small and medium-size health-care clinics.