Stasis Labs, a company endeavoring to reinvent the patient monitor for non-intensive care settings, has raised $5 million in a round led by RTP-HC, the healthcare arm of RTP Ventures. Wonder Ventures and Techstars Ventures also participated in the round. Stasis Labs was incubated at the Cedars-Sinai Techstars accelerator.

Stasis provides a full system for monitoring patients in the general wards of hospitals and in non-hospital care facilities. Home care is on their roadmap, but not for the near future. The platform includes off-the-shelf sensors, cloud-based monitoring that can send alerts to care team members, and an in-room patient monitor which is designed to be easily readable — even to patients and their families. 

“Instead of all those numbers and waveforms that patients and families don’t really understand, we decided to go with little icons,” COO and cofounder Michael Maylahn told MobiHealthNews. “And that’s because patients and families are the ones that are actually looking at the screen...If they don’t understand that, it adds a lot of stress and anxiety. So we have little icons and color-code the status. Green is good, yellow’s a warning.”

Stasis Labs’ platform is not yet FDA cleared, and that’s one reason that the company has decided to initially launch it’s product in India, where several pilots are underway right now. 

“The primary reason for us going to India is we were essentially able to enter the market with a significantly more [minimal] minimum viable product,” Maylahn said. “The barriers to entry in the US market can be very challenging. And if you take a product like ours which has three different software stacks, as a class 2 medical device there’s a lot of barriers — in terms of regulation, registration, in terms of integration. And so ultimately the amount of time to get to the US market was very high. We had the integration and access to go into the Indian market. The need was there and the entry point was a lot lower.”

The funds will be used to continue the pursuit of FDA clearance and inroads into the US market, as well as to manufacture more units and expand deployment in India, Maylahn added. He says the clearance process is well underway, and the company has experienced team members that have navigated the 510(k) process before.