GE Ventures and Stanford Health Care have teamed up to create Evidation Health, a company focused on evaluating the efficacy of digital health technologies. Soon after Evidation was formed it merged with wellness engagement platform company The Activity Exchange.
In January Evidation raised a little more than $6 million in funding led by GE Ventures with participation from Asset Management Ventures and Rock Health. AMV and Rock Health were also both previous investors in The Activity Exchange. GE Ventures has incubated Evidation at its offices -- a first for the company's venture arm.
According to a statement, Evidation will be "focused on generating real-world clinical and economic evidence for digital health products and platforms" by combining "health outcomes data with new approaches to predictive analytics to identify and deploy the most effective and efficient patient management strategies and interventions."
In other words Evidation hopes to help separate which digital health technologies actually work from those that don't and are just coasting on hype.
Evidation CEO Deborah Kilpatrick told MobiHealthNews in an interview that Evidation will help digital health startups, pharmaceutical companies, biotech companies and others better understand which digital health technologies positively impact health outcomes. Evidation will work with its partner Stanford and in the future other health care systems to study digital health interventions. Startups could work with Evidation to generate that much-needed efficacy data to back up their marketing claims.
By contrast, The Activity Exchange was a platform that aggregated data from a wide range of health and fitness apps and devices. The company aimed to help insurance companies, pharma companies and others build better engagement with their patients or members.
Evidation plans to continue to work with The Activity Exchange's past customers and academic partners, which include: Humana, Biogen, Sanofi, Harvard Business School and Wharton.
As noted above, Kilpatrick, formerly of CardioDx, is Evidation's new CEO, while Christine Lemke, who was one of four The Activity Exchange co-founders, will serve as the company's chief product officer. Amy Belt Raimundo, formerly of Covidien Ventures, will serve as Evidation's chief business officer.
Kilpatrick said the other the three other Activity Exchange co-founders, including former CEO Mikki Nasch, Head of Data Science Luca Foschini, and CTO Alessio Signorini are all working at Evidation now. In total the Evidation team includes between 10 and 15 people.
