A health IT company that includes a former member of the IBM team that helped adapt the Watson supercomputer for healthcare has raised $12 million to bring to market a clinical decision support tool that uses customized remote patient monitoring to keep the 26 percent of Americans with multiple chronic conditions out of the hospital.
Sentrian is using biosensors and machine learning to make spotting signs of deterioration across multiple chronic conditions a more exact science and reduce the number of false positives that they can generate. In a phone interview with MedCity News, co-founder and CEO Dean Sawyer, said its approach involves monitoring multiple chronic conditions simultaneously, as opposed to other companies that monitor these conditions one by one. Its approach seeks to factor in how those chronic conditions affect each patient and develop more personalized settings to trigger early interventions.
It raised $8 million in a Series A from Reed Elsevier Ventures, Frost Data Capital and TELUS Corp’s investment arm. It also raised $4 million in seed funding, according to a company statement.
Asked what kind of biosensors it works with, Sawyer said it was device agnostic but would favor passive monitoring devices such as patches. For instance, a Withings sleep monitor comes in the form of a pad that’s placed beneath the mattress. One goal is to avoid wasted healthcare spending and also to capture data that might otherwise be missed by focusing on one condition over another.
The platform is designed to help physicians identify patterns in patients that can make it easier to detect the source of the problem. Dr. Marty Kohn, the chief medical scientist and a former emergency room doctor who previously worked at IBM, pointed out that part of the complexity treating these patients posed means the diagnosis for a patient with a symptom like shortness of breath has an obvious cause. That requires pushing technology to develop a way to view all of the meaningful data in context.
Update The developers not only see it as being used to avoid readmissions but also to reduce the need for hospital care year round. Although health systems are the target audience, accountable care organizations are looking for this kind of solution too, noted Dr. Marty Kohn, a co-founder and former emergency room doctor who worked as a chief medical scientist at IBM. He added that Medicare Advantage plan patients are another patient group it is pursuing as 10 percent of Medicare Advantage patients account for 73 percent of healthcare costs. Sentrian will offer the service on a subscription basis.
“The problem with a lot of sensor devices is they just transfer data — it’s up to clinicians to look at screens all day,” said Kohn. “With our technology, clinicians can set the parameters.”
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.
The company is carrying out two one-year pilots with health plans. Caremore, a Wellpoint company, is using Sentrian’s technology for patients with patients have chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It includes 2,000 patients — half will be tested with the device and the other half will be in a control group. A second payer based in New York also has a pilot with COPD patients — it is testing the device on 500 patients with another 500 in the control group.
Update: This story has been updated to correct Dr Marty Kohn’s job title.
