Define Ventures Founder Lynne O’Keefe

Digital Health

Atropos Raises Capital to Bridge Evidence Gap

Atropos Health is a tough company to pin down with a short intro. It’s one part physician consult service, one part real-world data network, mixed together to close “evidence gaps” wherever they might be.

Over 70% of care decisions lack sufficient personalized evidence, in large part due to clinical trials excluding the same share of the population. This is the evidence gap that Atropos exists to bridge, and it just raised an undisclosed amount of fresh financing to support that mission. 

The Green Button is the interface that allows physicians to surface answers to their clinical questions by quickly producing retroactive observational studies called Prognostograms.

• Prognostograms deliver the experience of a second opinion, but backed by real-world evidence tailored to a specific patient.

• As a result, physicians can incorporate more real-world evidence into their day-to-day practice, while ideally also cutting down on out-of-network referrals.

The Atropos Evidence Platform enables the magic on the front end, serving as a foundation of insights from over 160M de-identified patient records and a partner network that includes big names like Mayo Clinic and Clarify.

• Data Scoring Solutions guide users toward the most appropriate data source for their question, side stepping the “garbage in, garbage out” problem that challenges some of the LLMs taking the industry by storm.

• Publication-grade studies and transparency is a versatile value proposition, and seems to be resonating with both providers (Ex. point-of-care support, quality improvement programs) and life science orgs (Ex. clinical trial emulations, unmet need analysis).

Atropos is now setting its sights on the global market, with the recent financing tagged for international expansion and channel partnerships. The round was led by strategic investments from Samsung and Presidio, who will help kick off the expansion in Japan and Brazil.

The Takeaway

Health data is more available than ever and growing every day, yet we’re only scratching the surface of retrieving actionable insights from that complexity. Atropos is helping healthcare organizations realize the benefits made possible by years of infrastructure investments, not with a language model spitting out silver-tongued guesses, but with transparent evidence-based research at the point-of-care.

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The Wire

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• State of CareOps 2023: The results from this year’s State of CareOps survey are live, and the report includes wide ranging insights into the current landscape of care flow adoption, design, and best practices. One of the main takeaways was that top performers are pulling away from the rest of the pack, and the included benchmarks provide a great way to see how your organization stacks up across key metrics such as average utilization, provider time used for non-clinical tasks, and percentage of asynchronous care.

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• Higher Suicide Risks in Healthcare: In what appears to be the first study to quantify the relative risk of suicide in healthcare, researchers uncovered the disheartening statistic that US health workers die by suicide 50% more often than other professions. The results were especially pronounced among registered nurses, support workers, and health technicians (roles that usually see more repetitive work and lower compensation), prompting the authors to urge for better mental health support for these workers.

• Diligent Robotics Lands $25M: Diligent Robotics landed $25M in growth funding to “triple the reach” of its socially-intelligent (and cute) service robots for the clinical setting. The flagship Moxi robot performs fetch-and-deliver tasks for frontline care teams, such as delivering lab samples or collecting supplies, and Diligent expects to have upwards of 100 Moxi units deployed across 22 health systems by the end of the year.

• Employment Remains Strong: Healthcare employment just saw its best two-month stretch since the start of the pandemic, with Altarum Institute data showing that the sector added 71k jobs in August following another 73k in July. Ambulatory care (39,900) and hospitals (14,500) led the pack, and healthcare employment now stands 3.2% above where it was prior to COVID (vs. 2.6% across all industries). Despite the strong job market, year-over-year wage growth clocked in at 3.3% in July, trailing the overall private sector (+4.4%).

• Microsoft AI Collaborations: Microsoft is pedal-to-the-metal in healthcare. Mayo Clinic announced that it will be among the first health systems to deploy Microsoft 365 Copilot, giving its staff the ability to test generative AI features embedded within productivity apps like calendar, email, and documents. In a similar spirit, Mercy entered into a long term collaboration with Microsoft that’ll see the system use Azure OpenAI Service to apply generative AI enhancements to patient-provider communications, live phone support, and internal HR processes.

• ACC Home-Based Cardiac Care Workbook: Home-based care has become one of the biggest trends in cardiology, and the ACC just released a similarly big workbook to guide providers through the emerging trend. The ACC Home-Based Care Workbook gives a comprehensive overview of home-based cardiac care’s advantages, challenges, tactics, and benefits, making it a solid resource for any provider looking to create or improve their program.

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• Ophelia + Vori: Ophelia is joining forces with musculoskeletal care provider Vori Health to help more patients address their pain without the use of opioids. A fifth of all patients are prescribed opioids at their initial visit for MSK pain despite guidelines that encourage alternatives, and the partnership aims to improve access to those alternatives by enabling Ophelia to refer patients to Vori for non-opioid pain management, while Vori will refer patients to Ophelia for digital opioid addiction treatment.

• Cancer Diagnoses Drop: A report from the American Cancer Society confirmed previous research showing a sharp drop in new diagnoses of six major cancers in early 2020. The decline was greatest for cancers typically diagnosed via screening, such as breast (-9%), lung (-15%), and colorectal cancer (-16%). That’s correlated to reduced screenings at the onset of the pandemic, although excess all-cause mortality from COVID could account for part of the decline.

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