Home Health Care San Francisco startup raises $6.75 million for remote health monitoring

San Francisco startup raises $6.75 million for remote health monitoring

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More than 6 million Americans suffer from heart failure and that number is only expected to increase in the future. What’s more is that heart failure patients alone are responsible for 42 percent of all hospital admissions.

San Francisco-based Myia Labs is one of a crop of companies hoping to use the explosion in sensor technologies to help clinicians better monitor these patients remotely to improve their health outcomes and foresee issues before they arise.

Recently the startup raised a $6.75 million seed investment round led by BootstrapLabs and Zetta Venture Partners to further develop its remote patient monitoring platform and fund clinical research efforts into its effectiveness.

“As the country and the healthcare system moves to value-based care, how on earth can providers be successful if they don’t know about 80 percent of their risk base?” Myia CEO and co-founder Simon MacGibbon said in an interview.

The company was founded last year and has developed technology that analyzes data from a combination of clinical and commercial devices to track the health status of patients at home.

Heart failure patients, for example, receive equipment including sleep sensors, connected scales, wearable devices and tablets to monitor vital signs like respiratory rates, heart rates, blood pressure and weight.

The company integrates with a range of devices like the Apple Watch, Fitbit trackers and the Motiv Ring to transmit data from the machines to the Myia platform, which analyses and parses through the numbers.

Clinicians can then use this information to better optimize care, improve treatment plans and clinical visits and get an early warning if patients are at high risk of their conditions worsening or readmission to the hospital.

One important use case highlighted by MacGibbon was medication titration, essentially dialing in dosage so that drugs have their intended effect. Research into the company’s initial target market of heart failure patients have found that less than 25 percent receive recommended drug dosages.

MacGibbon said the company’s current challenge is building validation in the product through research and that is where a majority of the new capital will be deployed.

Myia is currently in a multi-site trial in collaboration with UC San Francisco to build a data set that will help validate its algorithm and build its predictive models. The company is also working on a number of research pilots with providers to determine best practices and workflow integrations. These efforts are a precursor to the company’s further efforts to gain regulatory approval for its technology.

“I have been impressed by the fact that our provider partners realize it’s a journey to develop this software, which is traditionally not how healthcare has gone in the past,” MacGibbon said. “We’ve explained to them that you’re not going to recognize healthcare in 10 or 20 years, so let’s figure out that future together.”

Myia has also been buoyed by a partnership with the American College of Cardiology, the nonprofit medical society made up of cardiovascular clinicians. The organization invested in the company’s seed funding and also lends its clinical expertise to inform the development of Myia’s platform.

“Through our collaboration with Myia, we are developing tools for clinical teams to monitor and improve their patients’ health status.” Dr. John Rumsfeld, Chief Innovation Officer for the American College of Cardiology, said in a statement.

An additional tailwind for the remote monitoring industry has been government and regulatory support. In a move to incentivize and promote remote patient monitoring technologies, CMS recently announced new billing codes to reimburse providers for virtual check-ins and remote monitoring of chronic care conditions.

While the company is exploring other markets including biopharma, MacGibbon said the company’s primary focus will remain on helping providers close what he called the “clinical last mile” that distances care facilities and everyday life.

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