What with the Affordable Care Act making health insurance more widely available, healthcare providers and other medical organizations are under growing pressure to accurately predict the costs of patient care.

Apixio Inc., a San Mateo, Calif.-based data science company, is hoping to help healthcare providers do just that. The six-year old startup offers a cognitive computing solution called the “HCC profiler” that helps healthcare providers better understand their patient’s chronic medical conditions, in order to better optimize their care. HCC profiler works the way all the best Big Data platforms do, by analyzing reams of unstructured medical data, including existing clinical records and doctor’s notes, in order to provide healthcare organizations wit the insights they need to accurately estimate patient risk. In turn, healthcare providers can bill their patients more accurately and also deliver more effective medical treatments.

It’s a business model that clearly works, for Apixio has just landed its fourth venture capital funding round. It’s a big one too, with the company pulling in $19.3 million in a Series D round led by SSM Partners, with participation from First Analysis, Bain Capital Ventures and Apixio’s largest angel investor. That Apixio has also seen the number of patients analyzed by its platform grow by 210 percent in the last year, further underlines its success.

The company says it plans to use the new funds in its war chest to advance and scale the products powered by its cognitive computing platform, in order to generate better insights for its customers.

“SSM Partners’ commitment to innovative products, smart growth and true data-driven care matches our vision at Apixio,” said Darren Schulte, MD, CEO at Apixio. “We will use this capital to develop new applications that create insights for appropriate care and quality measurement. We’re eager to meet the healthcare market’s increasing appetite for applied data science and are confident our cognitive computing platform will play a leadership role in the transformation of how healthcare is consumed and delivered.”

Apixio is clearly determined to stay at the forefront of what is a rapidly emerging, and soon to be very profitable market in healthcare-focused data science solutions. Few will deny there’s an acute need to tap into unstructured health data and provide more effective insights about patient’s medical conditions. Doing so will lead better outcomes for both patients and healthcare providers, by prolonging lives and increasing profitability to boot. With Grand View Research estimating that this market segment could be worth $5 billion by 2022, it’s no surprise Apixio is striving for a bigger piece of the pie.

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