Carta Healthcare, which offers AI technology that helps abstract data faster, announced they acquired Realyze Intelligence, a portfolio company of UPMC Enterprises.

The companies aim to expand and strengthen their combined AI platforms. 

Realyze Intelligence platform leverages AI to match patients to clinical trials to expedite research and lower costs, while providing patients with the newest breakthroughs in care.

With a focus on oncology, Realyze Intelligence examines structured and unstructured data in EHRs to identify ideal patients for clinical trials and other research studies. 

Additionally, Realyze Intelligence’s clinician-trained AI can assemble suitable cohorts in seconds rather than the hours or days the process takes when performed manually.

Meanwhile, Carta Healthcare’s platform applies AI to structured and unstructured data to reduce the time and price for data abstraction. 

Carta Healthcare and Realyze Intelligence anticipate that their combined technologies’ "powerful" automation can offer faster insights and considerably reduced labor demands for clinical data registry abstraction, research and internal clinical quality performance programs in oncology, cardiovascular health and other specialty areas.

Moreover, the expectation is that Carta Healthcare’s platform, added to Realyze Intelligence’s AI technology, has the potential to significantly expand the feasibility of trials and other research while increasing data abstraction for cancer and other clinical data registries with expert clinician oversight.

"We believe data is the single most important ingredient to improve healthcare," Brent Dover, CEO of Carta Healthcare, said in a statement.

"From clinical trials to clinical registries, clinicians face insurmountable amounts of data ripe with valuable information to improve care practices and patient outcomes. We are inspired by Realyze Intelligence’s shared ability to use clinician-trained AI and a human-in-the-loop approach to maximize insights from clinical data, for clinical trials and cancer registries." 

Aaron Brauser, founder and CEO of Realyze Intelligence, pointed out that health systems and pharmaceutical companies invest billions each year to identify and enroll patients for clinical trials, a process that is costly, labor-intensive and time-consuming.

"High-quality, timely data is essential for accurately identifying eligible patients, yet much of it remains trapped in EHRs and other systems. We are excited to revolutionize clinical trial matching and reuse the data to enhance research, optimize care pathways and improve patient outcomes with Carta Healthcare," Brauser said in a statement. 

THE LARGER TREND

In 2023, Carta Healthcare announced the closing of $25 million series B financing, with additional investments from Memorial Hermann Health System and UnityPoint Health. 

The additional funding followed a $20 million Series B financing round that was announced in November 2022. That round included investors Paramark Ventures, Frist Cressey Ventures, American College of Cardiology, Asset Management Ventures, CU Healthcare Innovation Fund, Mass General Brigham, Maverick Ventures Investment Fund and Storm Ventures. In 2022, Carta Healthcare became a certified software vendor for the Society of Thoracic Surgeons/American College of Cardiology  Traanscather Valve Therapy Registry. That announcement came in the wake of a successful $20 million Series B fundraising round. 

In April, researchers at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center applied machine learning and large language models to augment the manual curation of cancer data elements using the Realyze Intelligence platform.

In February, Realyze Intelligence earned a position among the inaugural class of start-up companies selected for the CancerX Startup Accelerator, part of the Biden administration Cancer Moonshot program that aims to cut the U.S. cancer death rate in half within the next 25 years.

The competitive program gave Realyze Intelligence, which uses AI to match cancer patients to clinical trials, access to connections and collaborations with leading cancer organizations to help reinforce its technology.