Lisbon-based digital health startup, UpHill, which develops software to guide clinical decisions, has raised €3.5 million in a seed round to scale up its product within healthcare institutions worldwide.

The seed round was led by Brighteye Ventures and MSM.

A month ago, the company also received €1 million European funding to lead an R&D project on clinical pathways implementation. 

WHY IT MATTERS

Through its software, UpHill aims to tackle the variability of clinical practice, improve medical outcomes and resource efficiency.

According to the National Center for Biotechnology Information, the impact of clinical decisions on healthcare quality is often reduced to clinical errors that cost approximately $20 billion a year, in the U.S. 

According to the World Health Organisation, European data consistently show that medical errors and healthcare-related adverse events occur in 8% to 12% of hospitalisations.

Founded in 2015 by three medical doctors dedicated to improving the variability of clinical practice and its impact on patient outcomes, the startup strives to standardise clinical care through evidence, support healthcare professionals' productivity during this process, and improve healthcare quality sustainably.  

THE LARGER CONTEXT

Alphabet’s life science subsidiary Verily is teaming up with the Mayo Clinic to develop a digital point-of-care clinical decision support tool. The partnership will start by zeroing in on cardiometabolic conditions, and is directed at contextualising information and giving care guidelines to clinicians. 

ON THE RECORD

Eduardo Freire Rodrigues, UpHill CEO and co-founder, said: “Even within the same hospital, the way each person is treated heavily depends on the medical team by whom each patient is being assisted. This variability impacts patient outcomes and organisations' efficiency, making it hard to understand which set of actions led to the best results and what should be optimised.

"Our solution works like a GPS for healthcare settings, providing real-time, evidence-based, and multidisciplinary guidance on which path should be followed by a particular patient. As a result, clinicians improve compliance with best practices easily, organisations reduce unwarranted waste, and patients’ outcomes become more predictable.

“So far, UpHill has been focused on simplifying healthcare professionals’ access to accurate and actionable information to make better decisions. The upcoming times will be marked by significant and transforming advances in our product, making it automated, integrated, and useful from a patient perspective too.”