Digital health company InfoBionic has followed up a Series B round in November with an $8 million Series B-1 round in order to commercialize the second generation of a device that transmits a continuous feed of the patient’s heart rhythm to detect cardiac arrhythmia. The company expects to add 10-20 staff with the funding, mainly for sales and marketing support. It will allocate funding to product development, expanding its platform to include other chronic conditions.
Safeguard Scientifics led the financing round with participation from existing investors Excel Venture Management; Zaffre Investments, a subsidiary of Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts and angel investors, according to a company statement.
Although she declined to provide images of the new device, CEO and co-founder Nancy Briefs told MedCity News in a phone interview that physicians and patients showed dissatisfaction with the initial device’s design through a series of studies and interviews it conducted. It had a short battery life and patients didn’t care for carrying the equivalent of a second smartphone around with them. So it avoided commercializing the first MoMe Kardia device and focused on a new device that patients could wear.
Briefs said it expected the FDA to make a decision on whether to clear the class 2 medical device sometime around the second quarter of 2016.
She said the most significant point of difference between its approach to remote monitoring and its rivals was this: rival companies embed their IP in the devices while InfoBionic’s is built on a cloud-based platform, which she said gives it a lot more flexibility. While rivals can only transmit “snippets” of data, it can send a continuous feed. It delivers automated reporting to any mobile device, tablet or web-based portal where physicians can access and interact with the data they need, in the detail they want, according to a company statement. Briefs said it charges a flat fee for use of its device.
Its approach creates much more data, which comes with its own set of challenges. On the other hand, this steady stream of data is the kind of thing that interests biotech and pharma companies for clinical trials. Its platform was also intended to monitor other chronic conditions. It also has population health applications which makes it appealing to insurers, such as Blue Cross Blue Shield franchises.
The market opportunity in cardiac monitoring is estimated at approximately $26.6 billion by 2020. What’s made this particular area so attractive for companies like InfoBionic is that physicians can be reimbursed for monitoring, the market is fragmented with no one large company dominating the digital health arena. But that is already beginning to change.
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.
Although Briefs said the companies in the digital health-cardiac diagnostic space tend to be on the small side, the major medical device companies are taking a growing interest. Boston Scientific invested in Preventice this week, as part of an opportunity medical device companies see to make value based care part of their business. In a company statement, Boston Scientific executive vice president and president, Rhythm Management Joe Fitzgerald said these monitoring devices offer a way to execute on population health goals:
“As our healthcare environment continues to evolve, healthcare practitioners, administrators and payers are looking for solutions that identify relevant clinical insights from large volumes of patient data and integrate those insights to improve clinical decision-making…This collaboration with Preventice Solutions, which has an infrastructure optimized to monitor hundreds of thousands of patients each year, is a critical step in our effort to improve patient outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.”
