Lifen raises $22.7 million for its healthcare messaging platform

French startup Lifen is raising a $22.7 million (€20 million) funding round. Partech is leading the round with Idinvest Partners and Majycc eSanté Invest also participating. Existing investors Serena and Daphni are also investing again.

Most of the healthcare industry in France still relies on good old physical letters with stamps and everything. Lifen wants to help practitioners and hospitals switch to digital letters instead to save time and money.

While it’s easy to send a digital receipt instead of printing one, it gets a bit more complicated with health information. Companies have to comply with regulation and make sure that everything remains confidential. Lifen says that everything is encrypted in transit and at rest, and the company can’t access your data.

Lifen acts as an interface with multiple electronic messaging protocols — MS Santé, Apicrypt, Zepra and Medimail. You can send a letter using those protocols in a few clicks. And because paper isn’t going to die overnight, you can also send letters through the French postal service using Lifen as well.

The startup manages a directory of healthcare professionals and also handles read receipts. When it comes to receiving messages, Lifen acts as a unified inbox that lets you receive messages, documents and reports from various channels — it essentially looks like an email interface with an inbox and an outbox. You can then export each document and sort them in a patient folder.

When it comes to user experience, the startup tries to automate as many things as possible. After setting up Lifen, you can select it as a printer in the printing popup — it’s compatible with any app that supports printing.

The service then tries to detect names and addresses to figure out who is supposed to receive the letter. Lifen searches its directory to find out how to contact this particular healthcare professional.

Individual healthcare professionals can access Lifen for €25 per month. And I’m sure hospitals pay a lot more to access the service.