San Juan Capistrano, California-based remote monitoring analytics company Jointly Health has raised $1.3 million from investors including Frost Venture Partners and Reed Elsevier Ventures. This brings the company's total funding to date to $3.8 million.

According to CEO Dean Sawyer, the company's first product is still awaiting FDA 510(k) clearance, but they have their first few health plan customers lined up once that clearance is secured. The funding will be used to hire additional team members and otherwise prepare for those implementations.

Jointly is working on a remote analytics and monitoring platform which will take data from third party sensors, analyze it, and make it actionable to help prevent hospitalizations for patients with chronic diseases, including older patients and patients with diabetes and COPD. 

The platform is "designed to continuously identify patient’s in need of remote monitoring, enable the development of health deterioration detection models, monitor patients, detect deterioration before symptoms manifest themselves and communicate this information to the appropriate person on the patient's care team so they can intervene before the problem becomes acute and requires hospitalization," according to the company.

"Every company’s doing very basic binary alerting," Sawyer told MobiHealthNews. "If you gain two pounds of weight, send an alert. If your blood pressure goes up a few points, send an alert. The problem with that is you miss a lot, and there’s a lot of false alarms. ... But being able to personalize the rules for an individual patient, there’s [currently] no way to do that. ... We’ve built tools that use natural language, to iterate those models as much as [customers] want. The initial rules can be customized for the individual, which is going to allow them to be much more specific, sensitive, and to eliminate any false alarms."

The system also learns the basic patterns of patients' vital signs and predicts them into the future, alerting caregivers only if they deviate from the norm.

"Our product continually risk stratifies patients based on the remote biometric data and other remote health data signals we are processing in near-real-time," Sawyer said in an email. "When a patient’s risk state changes and an intervention is required by someone on the patient’s care team, we notify that person in near-real-time."

Sawyer said Jointly is part of the Qualcomm Life 2net ecosystem, so it works with any sensors on the 2net platform, as well as some others.