“Non-clinical workflow” companies continue to lead the pack in terms of digital health funding, and ambient monitoring startup care.ai just added $27M to the segment’s Q4 total following its latest raise.
care.ai’s Smart Care Facility Platform uses ambient sensors spread within care facilities to monitor patients and their caregivers, informing real-time clinical and operational insights.
- The platform records data such as patient bed exits and falls, while also reducing manual tracking in EHRs by enabling contactless check-ins and screenings.
- The ambient nature of the solution means that patients aren’t required to wear any RPM device for it to be effective, removing a big source of friction for many virtual nursing or virtual sitting programs.
The fresh funding will help care.ai expand to more hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, and assisted living facilities, building on the 1,500 locations already using its technology.
- care.ai points to the continued prevalence of staff shortages and burnout as key demand drivers for its solutions, which aims to improve the lives of overworked staff by automating away manual workflows.
- Other products from GE, ADT Health, or even Amazon’s Alexa fall detection feature compete at least somewhat within the same arena, but care.ai is focused on creating the first truly care site-agnostic solution to the problem of ambient patient monitoring.
The Takeaway
care.ai is setting out to automate away the manual processes causing higher burnout and operational costs for the organizations attempting to deliver optimal care. It’s a tough promise to live up to, but the company’s leadership has done it before. care.ai founder and CEO Chakri Toleti sold his previous patient engagement startup HealthGrid to Allscripts for $60M, and prior to that was putting his motion sensor expertise to work while filming what look to be some pretty epic Bollywood action movies.
