Irvine, California-based Rapid Healthcare, a maker of SaaS for a few different medical mobile apps and clinical support platforms, has raised just under $1 million in new funding from Watermark Venture Capital. 

The funding will be used to advance Rapid Healthcare’s core products, which include a mobile gateway server called H-Gateway, a patient medical record platform and four apps – one for specimen collection, one for wound care, and two integrated apps designed to prevent mis-feeding of infants in neo-natal intensive care units (NICU).

The infant feeding apps, Mother’s Milk and Donor Milk, are the first of Rapid Healthcare’s apps to extend past the pilot phase and are now in practice in four different NICU locations, including southern California’s Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center. Both track and verify feeding of NICU infants – Mother’s Milk ensures a correct match between mother and infant receiving expressed breast milk, and Donor Milk ensures the baby is enrolled in a donor milk program that may also include fortified formula.

NICU nurses must adhere to strict feeding administration guidelines, and the primary goal of the integrated apps is to prevent mis-feeds regardless of the nutritional needs of each individual infant. Most commonly, verification is done manually, which can be time consuming and is done after the fact rather than right at the moment the baby is fed. 

The app guides NICU nurses through the creation of labels for feeding bottles and verification of the infant’s identification for both Mother’s Milk and Donor Milk. Nurses scan the baby’s wristband into the smartphone, then print matching labels to apply to infant milk bottles. Once the bottles are filled, nurses scan the labels into the app, and then scan the baby’s wristband again to either verify or deny the match by checking against current EMR for the mother and infant. The app confirms if the correct mother’s breast milk is being fed to the correct infant, or that an infant is authorized and enrolled to receive donor milk.

After the feeding, the data is stored on Rapid Healthcare’s internal server, H-Gateway, and nurse administrators can look at daily, weekly, monthly or yearly NICU and activity reports for the entire nursing staff through the Mother’s Milk and/or Donor Milk web portal.

When the app was piloted at the Pomona Valley Hospital Medical Center, the hospital was able to eliminate dual nurse sign-off and manual workarounds, and also saw reduced costs and liability.

“The current situation is outdated, so we worked with nurses to understand their needs and we developed these apps so they can track and verify feeding at the point of care,” Rapid Healthcare Founder and CEO Anton Ansalmar told MobiHealthNews in an interview. “With this app, they can verify right in the moment and the information is stored both on the premise and in the cloud.”

The company will now focus on raising their next round of funding as well as looking for more NICU partnerships both domestically and internationally.