KenSci, a Seattle-based startup building a machine learning platform for healthcare, has raised a Series A round of venture capital worth $8.5 million. Ignition Partners, of Los Altos, California, led the funding round; Osage University Partners and Mindset Ventures also participated.
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KenSci has a bold purpose that doubles as a catchy slogan. “We are on a mission to fight death with data science,” CEO and Cofounder Samir Manjure told MedCity News.
The company conducts prescriptive and predictive analytics to assess the risk patients and populations have of getting sick and of running up expensive medical bills.
“We are really after predicting … how a disease is going to progress,” as well as the associated costs of treatment, Manjure said. “Prediction is better than a cure,” he said, putting a spin on the old adage that an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure.
The company has applied this principal to sepsis. Manjure shared statistics indicating that the survival rate is above 80 percent when antibiotic treatment starts within the first hour of infection, and drops precipitously over time, to less than 20 percent if it takes 12 hours to start antibiotics. Progression of sepsis can vary based on gender, ethnicity, comorbidities and even insurance coverage, highlighting the importance of good analytics.
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Still, 80 percent of care decisions are based on heuristics — the doctor’s “eyeball test,” Manjure said. That can only take into account about seven different factors, give or take a couple, he said. A rules-based clinical decision support system considers a few dozen different factors, though that is only used about 18 percent of the time, according to Manjure.
Machine learning technology considers hundreds of different variables, Manjure said. But only about 2 percent of care decision today rely on that today, he said.
KenSci hopes to change that by reducing the cost of implementing such advanced technology that includes billing considerations. “If you really want to bend the cost curve, you really have to look at it holistically,” Manjure said.
A year and a half after being spun out of the University of Washington Tacoma, KenSci boasts a database of 110 million data points on 15 million patients, featuring $5 billion worth of medical claims. The company claims it can produce a quick return on investment.
“In healthcare, it takes months and years sometimes to show ROI,” Manjure said. KenSci customers have shown ROI in as little as 12 weeks.
Photo: KenSci