Murj dashboard for cardiac implant data
Murj, a digital health startup to manage data generated from implanted cardiac medical devices, has closed a $4.5 million Series A round, according to a company press release. The company seeks to provide a technology platform that can sufficiently manage the steady flow of data implantable cardiac devices such as pacemakers and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators generate. The company wants to convert a manual, burdensome process into a more manageable and efficient way to track, assess and manage this data.
True Ventures led the Series A and Social Capital took part with other investors from the company’s prior seed round, the release noted.
Murj streamlines multiple data streams onto one platform, explained Todd Butka, Murj CEO and founder, in an email. The data is presented and organized so that it can assess the device and patient and capture and track these assessments.
Butka said in the release that his experience as an Apple product manager Medtronic sales rep drew his attention to the inefficiency of current practices.
“As a field representative working with electrophysiologists for over a decade, I was dismayed by the inefficiency of monitoring cardiac devices,” said Todd Butka, CEO of Murj. “From my experience at Apple, I saw the tremendous potential for well-designed technology to impact the care of patients with cardiac devices.
Butka contrasted current practice and how his company seeks to change this in an email.
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.
“Each device produces reams of data, and clinicians have to manage that data in multiple, siloed locations,” said Butka. “For patients whose devices are managed remotely, each device manufacturer offers data access from their own websites – so that’s four different websites from which data must be transcribed or PDF’s downloaded and printed.”
When patients go to the clinician’s office, the clinics are manually processing these device checks, using pen and paper to write down the data points that might be of interest to the doctor. The resulting burden might take 20 to 30 minutes per check, with 90 percent of checks are normal and no action is needed. Butka contends that his company’s technology can cut down the time these data checks take to a couple of minutes.
A dashboard displays patient data transmissions for routine device checks. A doctor can review their patient list, check any comments from the nurse, and complete the device check process.
One risk health IT vendors pose with their quest to de-silo data is that it may create another data silo instead of making it easier to share patient data with other institutions, with patients’ consent. Butka contends that’s not the case with his business.
“The entire premise of Murj is to streamline workflows, and unify the current siloes of implantable device data….Housing that data on one platform actually makes electronic health record integration a much simpler task. Murj is an open platform with full-data portability; all data can be freely exported in real-time or batch modality as desired by the customer to their EHR.”
Butka noted that the company designed Murj with EHR integration in mind.
“However, with our pilot sites we have observed that most customers don’t want to customize an EHR to replicate the depth of Murj’s data and analytics functionality; current EHR integration requests focus on billing events and record archives, which is not a complicated integration. More detail about our customer implementations will be announced in the coming months.”
