HealthReveal, a predictive analytics startup run by a former Aetna chief medical officer, has raised its first full round of venture capital, a $10.8 million Series A. GE Ventures led the investment, joined by Greycroft Partners, Flare Capital Partners and Manatt Ventures.
While there seem to be dozens of purveyors of predictive analytics and artificial intelligence in healthcare, New York City-based HealthReveal is looking to separate itself from the herd by drawing distinctions between prospective/concurrent knowledge and retrospective data, Founder and CEO Dr. Lonny Reisman said.
HealthReveal also pulls in biometric data from home monitoring devices to help clinicians anticipate and respond to adverse medical events for those with chronic conditions. “Continuously monitoring the patient at home gives you insights others don’t,” said Reisman.
Reisman started HealthReveal in early 2015, half a year after leaving Aetna. He had joined Aetna in 2005 when he sold another startup, personal health records firm ActiveHealth Management, to the health insurer.
The newly funded HealthReveal takes insights beyond population health down to the individual level, helping clinicians find the right piece of medical evidence for each patient in front of them. “We understand the difficulty of keeping up with the literature,” Reisman said.
It’s pretty much impossible to stay current on medical evidence without some kind of clinical decision support, and practitioners routinely stray from guidelines. “We actually only do the right thing clinically half the time,” Reisman noted.
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.
That’s where HealthReveal comes in. “We highlight variants in evidence-based standards,” Reisman said. Alert are sent with context to improve the chance clinicians will act on such warnings.
“We want to embed intellect into a system that can constantly scan an individual, like GE constantly monitors jet engines to prevent a crash,” said Reisman, giving a shout-out to the corporate parent of HealthReveal’s lead investor.
For example, atrial fibrillation is strongly related with elevated risk for stroke, he noted. If all physicians who detected AFib followed established guidelines, it could reduce the risk of stroke by two-thirds, according to Reisman.
The fledgling company has been testing its technology at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, New York.
“We are delighted to be working with HealthReveal and expect that the introduction of their technology will be a key driver of our future clinical and business success,” Dr. David I. Cohen, chairman of the Department of Population Health at Maimonides, said in a HealthReveal press release.
“The company understands that healthcare technology only matters if it helps transform data into actionable information that improves clinical care and outcomes,” Cohen added.
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