Evidation Health raises $11.6M to help assess digital health efficacy

By Brian Dolan
02:49 pm
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Evidation Health has raised at least $11.6 million, according to an SEC filing posted last week. The filing lists Raj Ganguly as a director of the company, indicating his venture capital firm, B Capital, participated in this recent round. Ganguly co-founded B Capital with Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and it just raised its newest fund.

A little over a year ago GE Ventures and Stanford Health Care announced that they had formed Evidation Health as a new startup that would focus on helping digital health companies and their potential customers better evaluate the efficacy of their technologies. Evidation was the first startup incubated at GE Ventures offices, and it absorbed another digital health company, called The Activity Exchange soon after its founding. As part of that deal, Evidation added a number of The Activity Exchanges’s executives, investors, and partners.

In January 2015 Evidation raised a little more than $6 million in funding led by GE Ventures with participation from Asset Management Ventures and Rock Health, which were both backers of The Activity Exchange.

At launch Evidation planned to work with its founding partner Stanford Health Care to study digital health interventions, but last year it added Ochsner as another provider partner. Ochsner and Stanford provide the company with large patient populations in a variety of conditions, demographics, and locations, to run studies on in order to build up clinical evidence that is robust, but also generalizable.

"From a provider partnership standpoint, we are being highly selective with who we work with because we want to go deep within those groups so we can set up really efficient systems with them,” Amy Belt Raimundo, chief business officer at Evidation told MobiHealthNews last November. "Going everywhere and having surface-level arrangements really doesn’t accomplish the goal of enabling these kinds of analyses and studies to be done efficiently. We are looking at what I would classify as a handful of partners that we’ll work with deeply and I’m very excited about Stanford and Ochsner because they really have put up the resources on their end in addition to ours. They're really committed to this.”

Last month Evidation announced yet another provider partner: Boston’s Brigham and Women’s Hospital. The two plan to test Medisafe's medication adherence app in a randomized control trial of 390 patients taking medication for high blood pressure. Patients will be monitored with an at-home Bluetooth blood pressure cuff.

“In … previous studies where Medisafe has shown there is some evidence that their app is helpful, those are patients that already had the goal of trying out the app to help them. So after they use the app, they have a tool to get them there,” Dr. Kyle Murowski, a fellow in implementation research at the Brigham and Women’s Center for Healthcare Delivery Sciences, told MobiHealthNews in an interview in May. “But the question is ‘would they have gotten there anyway?’ Would they already have had their blood pressure controlled without the app? That’s the question that remains this side of randomization. Once randomization happens and you can compare two groups, and you can hard and fast say ‘the technology is providing the medication control.’”

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