Pasadena, California-based Geneva Health Solutions, which makes a remote monitoring platform for cardiology practitioners, has raised $1.9 million in Series A funding in a round led by Nebraska Medicine, an early adopter of the cloud-based platform that aggregates data from a patient’s implanted cardiac device to their provider.
The funding will be used to carry the company through the next year as they work to get cardiology practices around the country onboard with their Remote Monitoring as a Solution (RMaS) platform. Founded in 2010, Geneva Health Solutions set out to help practicing cardiologists deal with data from cardiac devices during unscheduled visits, like to the emergency room. As it was (and currently is at many hospitals) the ER would have to call the device maker, have a representative come in with a programmer to extract the data, then work with the attending cardiologist to figure out what the device was telling them.
“Waiting for all of that, then having data that wasn’t aggregated so all different healthcare stakeholders to make a decision just doesn’t work,” Geneva CEO Yuri Sudhakar told MobiHealthNews.
For the first few years, Geneva focused on hospitals and still works with several, including UC San Diego, Paradise Valley Hospital and the University of Nebraska Medical Center. But they eventually expanded out of hospitals and began to transition to on outpatient cardiology practices, a focus that was galvanized in May of 2015 when the Heart Rhythm Society recommended a strategy of remote monitoring become the standard of care for all implanted devices.
“We realized that in addition to the fact that selling to hospitals is a bear, with a very long sales cycle, the real value was in moving beyond hospital walls into ambulatory care and home monitoring,” Sudhakar said. “When the recommendations came out, what happened was a big transition with cardiology practices that was a better way to manage patients, but then they have to manage all that data.”
As Geneva saw more implanted devices with home monitoring capabilities, using wireless networks to move the data around, they also saw cardiologists overwhelmed with the amount of data to contend with.
“A typical practice has 1,000 device patients, all from different device manufacturers, they aren’t streamlined, and there is no way to look at the workflow and triage and integrate all the information quickly and seamlessly,” Sudhakar said. “So that’s what we set our sights on.”
Geneva’s platform integrates with four major device manufacturers – Medtronic, Boston Scientific, Biotronik and St. Jude Medical – and aggregates the data on a cloud-based API framework that can sync with the EMR. They also offer remote care coordination services if a practice does not have the time or staff sufficient to handle the workflow.
For now, the company is focused on cardiac devices, but they look to expand onto other devices and disease states in the future to offer more telehealth services. They are working on a marketplace platform that would involve other connected devices, like smart blood pressure cuffs and scales as well as consumer wearables. The proposed Geneva Suite, an open developer platform, will function to provide the application, middleware, analytics and data necessary to create provider and patient-facing apps to integrate with EMRs.
“With the explosion of remote monitoring data, GHS solves a critical need in the market,” John Windle, professor of cardiology and practicing electrophysiologist at the Nebraska Medicine Heart and Vascular Center, said in a statement. “We were impressed with the company’s ability to effectively document clinic workflow and build those processes in the platform, including integration with our EMR. The platform is purpose-built for data flows today and tomorrow.”
