Riding the GLP-1 boom, VITL secures $7.5M to revamp hospital fee-for-service offerings.

The number of med-spas, weight loss clinics, and concierge systems where patients pay membership fees directly, often on the same day as seeing doctors, has exploded in recent years. But even when patients pay for these services out of pocket, providers often rely on programs designed for traditional, insured care.

INTan 18-month-old startup, is said to be solving one of the sector’s biggest technology challenges by building an e-prescribing platform – a digital tool for sending and managing prescriptions – for healthcare businesses that pay bills.

On Wednesday, VITL announced a $7.5 million Series A funding round led by SignalFire.

Founder and CEO Charlie Jordan built the Nashville-based company after realizing how much time medical professionals were spending managing uninsured health care.

Many providers still rely on faxes or phone calls to send instructions to compounding pharmacies, which make traditional prescriptions to order, often without knowing the final cost to the patient or how long the order will take to complete. The VITL platform addresses this by connecting hospitals to a global network of integrated pharmacies, providing real-time price comparisons and Amazon order tracking.

“We shorten the treatment time from a few minutes to a few seconds,” Jordan told TechCrunch.

For hospitals that place many orders each day, time savings add up.

VITL estimates that its technology saves customers up to two full working days per month by creating complex and visually appealing processes.

Payers are seeing value in the VITL platform. A year after its inception, the company reported that it had grown to more than 630 hospitals and made eight figures in annual rental rates (ARR), meaning the company should bring in $10 million a year.

That said, the 630 customers represent a small part of the market that includes thousands of hospitals across the US As the interest of GLP-1s -a group of drugs that includes Ozempic and Wegovy – peptides, and cosmetic procedures such as Botox is growing, the number of medical businesses that pay money is only set to grow.

VITL had never launched SignalFire, but the startup’s rapid growth caught his attention. That interest turned into a new, $7.5 million Series A led by the venture capital firm, known for its use. data and AI identify emerging companies.

VITL competes partially with Surescripts, the company’s e-prescribing pioneer, and with healthcare platforms such as Jane Software, which integrate with their electronic health record (EHR) software. What differentiates VITL from its competitors, he says, is its single-minded focus on the needs of the health care payer community.