Jeremy Edes Pierotti, CEO, Sansoro Health

CEO Jeremy Edes Pierotti is leading Sansoro Health as it scales up after the Minneapolis-based start-up raised $5.2 million in Series A funding led by Bain Capital Ventures.

The investment will help Sansoro Health expand sales, marketing and operations of its Emissary integration software, which allows for real-time, secure exchange of health care data between digital health applications and electronic medical records (EMR), Pierotti said.

It also will help the company as it works to deploy the software faster and to make data available to a patient, a physician or a health plan manager.

"Our vision is a world where that data is made available securely and easily to the right user at the right time on the right device, where you can always know that you're looking at data that is accurate," Pierotti said.

Sansoro Health's integration platform automates much of the process of exchanging data with EMR systems that use custom interfaces, Pierotti said.

"It's sort of like going from the artisan blacksmith situation to industrialization and the use of reusable parts," Pierotti said. "We're essentially providing reusable data integration parts that health systems can hand off to their other software vendors."

Pierotti founded Sansoro Health in 2014 with Dr. David Levin, chief medical officer; John Orosco, chief technology officer; and Mike Pietig, chief operating officer and partner with Pierotti in a health care management consulting firm that led EMR programs for hospital systems. The company has about 20 employees and next year expects to top 30.

Q: What does working with Bain mean to Sansoro Health?

A: Their investment gives us enormous credibility. It's a testament to what we have and the promise they see for the technology and for our business strategy going forward.

Q: What led to Sansoro Health's formation?

A: We saw an opportunity to improve the quality of health care delivery and reduce the cost by making it considerably easier to securely exchange patient health records. We looked at other industries like banking, retail, logistics and manufacturing and how they tie complicated systems together and realized that there is technology that is tried and true and test and that if applied to health care would be game changing.

Q: What kinds of results have you seen?

A: One of our customers is a Twin Cities-based health care [information technology] company that would frequently spend six to nine months implementing their software using the more traditional hand-built interfaces. They think that using our software they'll be able to get that down to about a month.

Todd Nelson