Update: This article has been updated to reflect that Verato was founded in 2012, not 2014. (April 27, 2022, 5:17 p.m.)
McLean, Virginia-based identity technology company Verato is slowly becoming a staple among local and national healthcare companies.
This marks a major shift since the company was founded in 2012 with a focus on fintech.
“We realized that because we had specialized technology that was incredibly accurate and incredibly differentiated, the one industry that valued precision more than any other was healthcare,” CEO Clay Ritchie told Technical.ly.
Verato is a technology company that helps healthcare providers verify the identity of their patients. The company’s technology (called reference matching) allows healthcare providers to match past records with new or current patients through a proprietary database. If someone moves and fills out a form with their new address, the system can verify that the patient once lived at the previous address the healthcare provider has on record.
Ritchie said the matching system allows health care providers to use past records to understand who they’re treating and what’s best for that person.
“It allows us to ensure that when a consumer becomes a patient and then becomes a consumer again, the health system knows who that consumer is, knows their history, and all of the information that we have about that patient, and their care plan and coordination is understood,” Ritchie said.
The system is especially useful for patients looking to ask for referrals or change providers, and Ritchie sees even more use in the telehealth market. He noted that the company’s AWS-based technology is built with cloud-native microservices that providers can use with nearly any other application or existing system.
The health tech industry’s recent strength coincides with Verat’s growth over the past few years: Ritchie said the company has grown 60% annually, with employee numbers growing from 90 at the start of 2021 to about 150 today (with more on the way). Employees are spread across 30 U.S. states, Ritchie added.
Ritchie attributes this growth to increased use of telehealth around the world since the COVID-19 pandemic began. According to Verato data, only 0.5% of outpatient visits and doctor visits were virtual before the pandemic, but that has dropped to 20% since the pandemic. Verifying patient identity during virtual visits fits right into the industry’s needs.
“These are workflows that happen every day today, and they exacerbate the identity problem,” Ritchie said. “To deliver the experiences we want across different physical and virtual environments, we need a trusted concept of identity.”
Verato plans to launch three new products this year. Given the versatility of identity technology, Ritchey hopes to eventually expand the technology beyond healthcare to other industries. The company already partners with several government agencies for identity verification during the hiring process. (McLean’s other identity technology company, ID.me, also frequently contracts with governments.)
“I would love to see a world in the future where one identity technology is the trusted provider of identity, not just for healthcare, but for all kinds of sensitive experiences where you need to manage trust and security,” Ritchie says. “Why wouldn’t you want one platform for that?”
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