Updated AirStrip, a mobile health company that makes clinical data accessible on smartphones and other mobile devices, has raised $25 million in strategic capital, according to a company statement. The funding will help the company move into the home health market, add more mobile applications to its platform and expand international sales, which the company projects will account for roughly 20 percent of its business in the second half of the year.
The move comes five months after it acquired handheld wireless fetal monitor business Sense4Baby. At the time of the acquisition, a company statement from AirStrip said it planned to apply for clearance to use the device for home-based monitoring.
Among the new investors in AirStrip are health systems Dignity Health and St Joseph’s Health, both of which are customers. Dignity Health has a 20-state network of hospitals, urgent and occupational care, imaging centers, home health and primary care clinics. St Joseph’s Health is a not-for-profit health system that has locations in California, Texas and eastern New Mexico. It includes 16 acute care hospitals, home health agencies, hospice care, outpatient services, skilled nursing facilities, community clinics and physician organizations.
Gary and Mary West Health Investment Fund, Sequoia Capital, and Wellcome Trust led the investment round. Leerink Partners also took part in the financing.
Update In a phone interview with MedCity News, Portela said this year it has been ramping up its vertical strength around chronic and clinical conditions, such as high risk pregnancies to move beyond the four walls of a hospital. One example of that has been its collaboration with New Jersey-based PeriGen, which produces clinical decision support obstetrics technology as part of a platform to monitor mothers in labor. PeriGen’s technology mobilizes assessments and interpretations of fetal heart rate patterns. “If you start putting sensors on patients you need to have a way to identify
which patients require more attention and which ones are deteriorating.”
Its interest in the home health market extends far beyond monitoring high risk pregnancies. It also involves connecting its AirStripONE platform to wireless home monitoring devices such as blood pressure cuffs and scales and transmitting that data in realtime to an analytics engine. By providing contextualized data for patients with chronic conditions such as COPD, congestive heart failure, and diabetes after they’re discharged from the hospital, it makes it easier for doctors to be more proactive to engage their patients.
Portela said it would be announcing a series of collaborations with academic medical centers and technology companies in the next month. As an example, he said AirStrip is working with a medical center that’s developed a set of algorithms for early detection of myocardial infarction which can be layered on top of an EKG solution to pinpoint where the narrowing has taken place. He added that it’s currently in talks with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration about the correct regulatory pathway for this tool.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
There’s also the international expansion, which is becoming an increasingly important part of its business. Portela said in the past year it’s been in talks with partners in Australia, Brazil Netherlands and, most recently, China. Most of these have taken place since it acquired Sense4Baby. But most have also expressed interest in its applications for monitoring heart conditions and diabetes.
“In the second half of this year, 20 percent of new business bookings are coming from international customers.”
In a company statement, CEO Alan Portela said, “We expect to take our mHealth leadership to new levels with upcoming announcements around real-time processing and clinical data analytics.”
Portela claims that one in six babies born in the U.S. is monitored with AirStrip, and at-risk patients were monitored 1.2 million times in 2013 using its platform.
Orlando Portale, the CIO for Palomar Health, joined the company in June as head of its innovation advisory board to help AirStip expand the capabilities of its AirStripONE platform to connect with and mobilize disease-specific body sensors, additional clinical decision support capabilities through advanced algorithms, and third-party analytics.
