Leading digital health company, Infermedica, has just raised over €26.5 million for its AI-powered solutions for symptoms analysis and patient triage. The funding is led by One Peak, and supported by previous investors Karma Ventures, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, Heal Capital, and Inovo Venture Partners.
It’s estimated that by 2030, up to 5 billion people will be unable to access basic healthcare, mainly due to provider shortages and burnout. A figure that makes for shocking reading, and presents a frightening problem – especially as we are still grappling with a global pandemic that has left a huge strain on health care systems worldwide. A strain that will take years to overcome.
The COVID-19 pandemic brought telemedicine into a new light. With people locked down at home, it has become the ‘new normal’ way of accessing healthcare. Now, telemedicine and monitoring are about to progress a step further with companies like Infermedica.
Founded in 2012 in Wrocław, the company offers an AI-driven platform that helps insurance, telemedicine companies and health systems increase efficiency through fast, digital symptom-checks. We talked to Infermedica’s CEO Piotr Orzechowski about how telemedicine and AI can help improve healthcare.
Infermedica’s mission is to ease the strain on global healthcare systems and make healthcare accessible, convenient and affordable by automating primary care. Infermedica’s MGP (Medical Guidance Platform) is the first step to achieving this vision by supporting and streamlining the healthcare decision-making process, from symptom to outcome.
MGP leverages the same technology behind Infermedica’s successful Symptom Checker tool, which has been used by over 10 million users globally, to triage patients to the right level of care. Infermedica plans to further develop the solution to enable seamless handover to providers, including EHR integration, as part of the intake process, as well as automating follow-ups to close the feedback loop.
Infermedica’s HIPAA-compliant AI solutions are already available in 30 countries and 19 languages and used by more than 90 healthcare organizations and partners, including Allianz, Microsoft, Sana Kliniken, Optum, Gothaer, and Médis.
Michael Rosenstock, Head of Sana Digital, Sana Kliniken, commented: “At Sana, our Symptom Checker, which is based on Infermedica’s technology, is directed towards patients and helps patients to understand and assess their symptoms. But the application also helps us to better understand what kind of treatment our patients require. These insights are evaluated and translated into actions which allow us to further improve the way we care for our patients.”
Infermedica’s team grew by 80% in 2021 to 180 specialists – including physicians, data scientists, and engineers, and 2022 will see Infermedica on the trajectory to double their workforce yet again.
The capital will be used to support Infermedica in tackling some of the biggest issues facing healthcare through further development of their MGP and adding new modules to cover the full primary care journey. The healthtech company will also increase their global commercial presence and expand their international, remote-first team of industry and medical experts.
Piotr Orzechowski, CEO and Co-Founder, said: “To date, we’ve spent over 60,000 hours of physicians’ work building one of the world’s most advanced medical knowledge bases of diseases, symptoms, and risk factors. We will deploy the new funds to execute our vision of making primary care more efficient and affordable by creating constantly improving AI technology for everyone on the planet.”
