Artificial Intelligence, Health IT, Hospitals

OR software company raises $45.6M and makes a new acquisition

Boston-based Caresyntax raised $45.6 million and acquired Syus, an analytics provider for hospitals.

 

A recent acquisition and an influx of fresh capital will help Boston-based surgical software company Caresyntax expand its footprint to more operating rooms.

Caresyntax closed on $45.6 million in funding to build out its suite of surgery software and fuel its growth across the U.S. Eight investors participated in the round, including Sunnyvale-based Plug and Play Ventures and a new limited partnership formed by Takeda and Tokyo-based Whiz Partners.

The software company also acquired Syus, an analytics provider for hospitals, which will complement its current work.

Caresyntax Co-Founder and Executive Chairman Dennis Kogan started the company in 2013, with the goal of reducing the high rate of complications from surgery. Roughly one in seven patients experience complications after a surgery. Kogan is not a surgeon himself—his background is in technology and finance. But he comes from a family of surgeons, giving him early exposure to the field.

“I saw how the most mission-critical part of hospitals can be so unstructured,” he said. “It’s hard for hospitals to know what’s happening just due to the timing of it. … (The operating room) is a complex environment where things happen on the go.”

While other industries, such as aerospace, use technology to reduce this kind of variability, the same hasn’t been done in surgery, Kogan said. His goal is to make surgeries faster, safer and on-time.

These individual factors can all affect each other. For example, a surgery that starts late or runs beyond the allocated amount of time can quickly become costly. Operating rooms have a very high cost-per-minute. But a late operation or a prolonged surgery can also increase the likelihood that a patient will experience a surgical site infection.

One of the features in Caresyntax’s software includes operational planning, or making the best use of the time allocated for the surgery.

“When you have everything running on time, people tend to make fewer errors,” Kogan said.

Caresyntax pulls in information from electronic health record systems, medical devices and surgical video. In exchange, it generates operating room analytics and reporting that hospitals can use to improve outcomes.

With its acquisition of Syus, Caresyntax will have access to even more health data. Nashville-based Syus provides operating room analytics to more than 100 hospitals across the U.S., or more than 1,000 operating rooms. That will be especially helpful to Caresyntax, given that the company opened its Boston headquarters just in 2017.

“That gave us a happy set of customers,” Kogan said. “With that also came a very interesting set of data.”

Between the two companies’ teams, data and data science capabilities, Kogan said Caresyntax will be able to develop better predictive analytics for its customers. The challenge is to turn troves of data into insights that hospitals can put into action.

“While hospitals have vast amounts of surgical data, they often lack the tools to analyze that data to inform OR processes,” Syus CEO Kevin O’Hara said in a news release.

Kogan also hopes the merger will help drive the combined company’s expansion across the U.S. and other markets. Caresyntax currently works with healthcare providers at the University of California-San Diego and the University of Strasbourg, as well as medical device companies Hill-Rom and Medtronic.

 

Photo credit: DaevichMikalai, Getty Images

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