It was supposed to be an innovation grant application. That was the initial idea when physician, disease hunter and entrepreneur Dan Peterson submitted a funding application for his healthcare software to address the big costly problem of antibiotic resistance. But as Dr. Amanda Christini, the director for strategic initiatives at the Center for Health Care Innovation, told MedCity News in a phone interview, the innovation grant application became much more than that. Peterson’s health IT company Teqqa represents Penn Medicine’s first direct equity investment in a startup.
Christini led the negotiations on Penn’s side. She said Peterson’s background and experience as both a software entrepreneur and epidemiologist with the CDC impressed them. It also helped that Peterson and Dr Keith Hamilton, the director of antimicrobial stewardship at the Hospital of University of Pennsylvania, hit it off.
“In many ways, with the science, technology, business strategy, the stars aligned,” said Christini. “It kind of morphed into an opportunistic play, but it also went a long way in showing people what’s possible.”
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Christini neither disclosed the size of the equity investment nor the terms of the deal.
The investment approach was a novelty for the healthcare group and it relied on folks from the Center for Technology Transfer and its UpStart program, particularly Michael Poisel, the director of UpStart, who helped do the equity documentation.
Asked how it would fit into the normal workflow of prescribing an antibiotic to a patient, Christini said there are a couple places it could go. It could be embedded into the ordering system so when the physician keys in the order for say, an antibiotic for eColi bacteria, there might be a message response recommending another eColi antibiotic with a lower resistance rate. It could also be used with an app.
Penn Medicine and Teqqa are jointly developing the software. It will create a back-end system that will call up the most up-to-date data from a particular hospital or hospital wing. It will provide real-time microbiology data analysis and a mobile app will give the prescribing physicians access to information that normally wouldn’t be updated more than every nine to 12 months.
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Peterson and Hamilton are in the process of developing mock-ups and gathering insights from other disease fellows as they figure out what the end user needs and wants. That process will take about three to four months. There could be a pilot of the antibiotic resistance app in the next six months. Eventually the plan is to offer it to other health systems.
One challenge for the collaboration is that Peterson is based in Wyoming. But Christini doesn’t necessarily see that as a problem, given that the project revolves around crunching big data.
Although Penn Medicine has previously invested in DreamIt Ventures’ fund for DreamIt Health, and has helped spin out companies from its Center for Technology Transfer, the investment in Teqqa marks a significant shift. It will be interesting to see when the next equity investment will be.
[Photo of doctor with mobile phone from BigStock Photo]