In a significant development poised to reshape the landscape of healthcare operations, Plenful, a visionary startup specializing in workflow automation tools for healthcare providers, has announced its emergence from stealth mode. According to a recent announcement, the company has successfully secured $9 million in funding, led by Bessemer Venture Partners, marking a pivotal moment in their journey towards revolutionizing the healthcare industry.

Plenful’s co-founder and CEO, Joy Liu, envisions a future where healthcare professionals can redirect their focus away from burdensome administrative tasks, alleviating burnout and enhancing the quality of patient care. The funding, she explains, will be directed towards expanding Plenful’s platform, nurturing the company’s 20-person strong team, with particular emphasis on engineering, product development, sales, and operations, and scaling its existing customer base, which currently encompasses around 20 healthcare companies.

Liu has acknowledged that the pharmacy industry is facing technician burnout and workload overload, while contributing to high turnover rates and high labor shortages throughout industry. However, Plenful helps them save time on menial tasks by helping to automate administrative work in order to free up time and allow the technicians and care teams to focus on top-of-license activities.

Before embarking on the journey with Plenful, Liu had a firsthand experience of the challenges faced in the healthcare industry, serving as a health system specialty pharmacy operator with Shields Health Solutions, which is now under the umbrella of Walgreens. She personally witnessed the manual and time-consuming nature of many pharmacy workflows and how they weighed down her team.

This issue transcends the confines of any single organization, as per a survey conducted by health tech company Holon Solutions, indicating that 77% of healthcare workers are grappling with burnout. The top reasons cited include inadequate resources to manage the workload, including the notorious paperwork, and the overwhelming demands from patients. Moreover, 34% of healthcare workers are spending over a third of their time on administrative tasks, and a staggering 72% expressed a keen interest in technology that can alleviate this burden.

Plenful has been engineered to tackle this challenge by seamlessly integrating with a health system’s existing data sources, meticulously monitoring for errors and automating manual data entry and validation. The platform is proficient in ingesting data in diverse formats, ranging from PDFs to electronic medical records. This intelligent system applies algorithms to provide actionable insights that empower clinical decision-making.

Plenful’s customers are embracing this transformative solution to automate document data entry for various purposes, including onboarding and referring prescription orders, conducting audits, and identifying potential areas of cost savings.

Joy Liu asserts that Plenful’s unique strength lies in its ability to reduce the implementation and maintenance burden on IT and engineering teams, a feature that was integrated from the ground up. Plenful was founded during the pandemic, inspired their services with a strong response to the urgent needs that arose from COVID. With the convergence of the industry’s increased interest in using AI, increased healthcare spending, and with ongoing labor shortages had significantly contributed to the company’s accelerated growth.

While Plenful competes with notable startups such as Notable, which streamlines healthcare administration through automation tools, and Infinitus, which recently secured $21.4 million for its tech that automates repetitive calls made by healthcare providers, Liu is confident that Plenful’s healthcare-centric, no-code, and highly configurable workflow automation solutions position it as a formidable player in the industry.

With Plenful’s unwavering commitment to revolutionize healthcare workflows and its impressive backing, the company is poised to lead the charge in enhancing efficiency and combating burnout within the healthcare sector. This $9 million funding round marks a significant milestone, setting Plenful on a trajectory towards a promising future in healthcare automation.