Myia Labs has raised $10 million in a Series A funding round led by Mercy Virtual, which pledged $5 million after deploying the startup’s AI and consumer wearable monitoring platform among its patients over the last few years.
Other investors in the round include Zetta Venture Partners, BootstrapLabs, Boston Consulting Group and B Capital Group, all of which participated in last year’s $6.75 million seed round.
WHAT THEY DO
Myia’s platform uses Apple Watches, Fitbits, Oura Rings and other consumer devices with monitoring capabilities to collect real-world patient data. These are combined with the company’s applied machine intelligence tech to generate insights on these patients’ chronic conditions, which clinicians can use to determine whether or not additional intervention is necessary.
"Real-world data from patients' everyday life is an essential element for clinicians to be more preventative in caring for patients,” Simon MacGibbon, cofounder and CEO of Myia Health, told MobiHealthNews in an email. “If inserted into clinicians' workflow at the right time, such data will allow them to see bad things before they happen, to personalize patient care plans (e.g., making more timely medication changes), and to optimize the use of scarce resources by focusing on the patients who need care the most. We think of this as ‘personalized care management,’ not just ‘remote patient monitoring.’"
Mercy Virtual, a so-called “hospital without beds” that focuses on lower-cost virtual care delivery, has had an at-home engagement service in place that so far has driven a 50% reduction in readmissions among chronic disease patients over two years. The provider has now partnered with Myia and brought the startup’s platform into this program, and told MobiHealthNews that its experience working with the team was what drove the relationship from a commercial partnership to a full-fledged strategic investment.
“Myia stands out for its breadth and depth of capabilities,” J. Gavin Helton, president of clinical integration at Mercy Virtual, said in a statement. “From a consumer-grade patient experience and seasoned machine learning and bio-computation experts to incredible depth of thought regarding how to surface actionable information into clinical workflows to allow our clinicians to practice at top of license, Myia can truly enable us to deliver on the promise of virtual care. Most important of all though is the trust and respect we have for each other as we work with urgency and transparency towards a common vision that will benefit patients and clinicians both."
WHAT IT’S FOR
The company told MobiHealthNews that this new investment will help it scale hiring efforts, particularly for roles relating to data science and mathematics, security and regulatory affairs. In addition, the funds will also fuel the product’s expansion from its initial focus on congestive heart failure to other chronic conditions such as COPD, Type 2 diabetes and hypertension — all of which will be focus areas of the Mercy Virtual implementation.
“Ultimately this will lead to better patient outcomes, such as reduced hospitalizations and improved patient and quality of life,” MacGibbon said. “The investment helps us scale to a large population of patients and train validate our proprietary mathematical models so we can scale the service to all populations.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
Device and AI-driven patient monitoring programs are increasingly being explored as the healthcare system as a whole is looking to reduce costly hospital stays and keep patients in their homes. Surveys and study data alike suggest that patients and their providers respond well to these types of programs, while investigations headed by big names like Eli Lily and Apple lend credence to the role consumer devices can play.
