Today in the first post of weekly industry update, I will go through some of the recent interesting news of digital health startups.
The behavioral health segment in the digital health industry is heating up. The US market size alone is $68 billion. The metal-health startups have raised more than $1.5 billion in 2020 and are expected to touch $3 billion in 2021. This week a UK based company called IESO announced series B funding. I was curious to know in this already overcrowded space how new companies are positioning and differentiating themselves. This space already has a few unicorns.
IESO has been around for 10 years now enabling text-based therapy through the UK's NHS to eligible residents. It has helped more than 80,000 residents and now IESO wants to use the historical data generated through these sessions to move to autonomous text-based therapy using AI. As per the reports hardly any other company has this kind of training data and that helped to generate the interest of the investors. IESO could use this real-world data and outcomes to design autonomous products which can give better results beyond the clinical trials. IESO also plans to go beyond diagnostic-only service and mild to moderate conditions. To further scale things up IESO wants to set up a shop in the US.
Let's move on to second interesting news. Respira labs, a bay area based start-up founded in 2018, announced a new product called Sylvee. It can be worn at the lower part of the rib cage and then it can continuously monitor lung functions for up to 2 weeks making it very useful for not just COPD and asthma patients, but other people who may have temporarily reduced lung function. The product generates sound through its speakers and then uses a microphone to capture changes in acoustic resonance. The company claims that this is a good proxy for changes in lung air volume — which is the basis of pulmonary function testing. Basically it aims to replace other tests which can be tedious like blowing air into something. As per the founder Dr. Maria Artunduaga, “Well-established science shows that air trapping can be measured with more than 90% accuracy using low-frequency sound. There is a clear difference in the acoustic resonance spectra of COPD patients versus healthy controls”. Essentially Respira labs aim to flag the abnormalities early remotely, enabling early treatment. Note that the device is currently a prototype and expected FDA clearance is 18 months down the line when there is data from a 500 people clinical trial from US and abroad.
Where Respira is focussing on chronic conditions, there is another company in news this week, called Viz.ai for the commercial launch of AI-driven solutions for acute pulmonary conditions. Diagnosis and care coordination of patients suffering from pulmonary embolism (PE) can be challenging, with the average arrival-to-treatment times lasting more than 8 hours. Viz.ai uses deep learning to identify suspected pulmonary embolism disease in under two minutes. The value here is faster decision making through coordinated care potentially saving a patient's life. Viz.ai has previously implemented a similar workflow of faster decision making through coordinated care saving critical time for stroke patients. In the words of Nikhil Krishan it is basically just AI-charged push notifications + a group chat. It’s deceptively simple…but that works! Viz.ai claims to be the leader in AI-powered care coordination and has accelerated the time-to-notification of the treatment team by 73 percent and time-to-treatment by 24 percent. The Viz Platform is now utilized in over 850 hospitals across the U.S. and Europe. Obviously the approval from CMS has helped tremendously where Viz.ai demonstrated how this tech creates new workflow and creates measurably better outcomes for patients.
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