Atropos Health Seeks to Bring Real-World Evidence to Point of Care

What began as a clinical decision support research project at Stanford Medicine more than five years ago has grown into a startup company that can launch a bedside search of millions of similar, anonymized electronic records to instantly aggregate data to inform patient care.

The Stanford researchers’ initial “Green Button” concept grew into an IRB-approved research project called the Clinical Informatics Consult service, with a proof of concept tested at Stanford Health Care over the last two years.

Now with search technology licensed from Stanford University, Atropos Health has announced its launch and close of seed funding round to bring what it calls “personalized real-world data” to the point of care. It will provide a digital solution for patients, providers, health systems, research universities, and risk-bearing entities.

Palo Alto, Calif.-based Atropos will deliver the on-demand “Prognostogram,” which leverages electronic health record data to derive digital evidence for individual patients.

The Prognostogram offers physicians real-world evidence individualized to the patient or clinical question they are treating. The solution is enabled by the company’s patented Atropos Evidence Platform technology that uniquely enables institutions to create value from previously siloed EMR data. In peer-reviewed research, the Solution solves the challenge of rapid personalized digital evidence for patients and caregivers. The solution has already been deployed, with two years of live experience with the service within Stanford Health Care. 

According to a 2009 JAMA article by the Duke University Clinical Research Institute, over 80 percent of patient care decisions lack clinical evidence. This leaves physicians and care stakeholders forced to rely on limited, underpowered clinical trials, often with cherry-picked patient populations, the company said. Many clinical studies deliberately exclude comorbid and complex patients and are demographically skewed. Yet much of the modern patient population is comorbid and or complex. Atropos Health said it will give a voice to those underrepresented patients, and offers caregivers scaled data driven evidence to make decisions about patient care.

“The promise of learning from the care of past patients is a concept has been discussed for a generation now” said Nigam Shah, M.D., associate CIO for data science for Stanford Health Care and co-founder of Atropos, in a statement. “Atropos Health uses a combination of technology, data, and a physician-centered service to fulfil the promise of data driven evidence for individual patients.” 

“By tailoring the service to the way physicians think, and practice medicine, we are able to meet physicians in the moment when they need information” said Saurabh Gombar, M.D., chief medical officer and co-founder at Atropos, in a statement. “When a physician orders a Prognostogram, they get the experience of a consult or second opinion, but backed by scaled evidence and tailored to their specific patient in a real-time manner.”

Another co-founder and board chairman is Brigham Hyde, Ph.D. He was the co-founder and president of Concerto Health AI and healthcare partner at Symphony AI. Concerto developed the definitive data set for real-world data and was a leader in AI solutions for precision oncology.

 Here are the types questions the platform expects to answer:

Prognosis: What is the likelihood of a patient having a specified outcome given patient characteristics?
Treatment: What is the likely effectiveness of an intervention on a specified outcome given patient characteristics? 
Diagnosis: What is the likelihood of a given medical condition given patient characteristics?
Prior Authorization: Given the patient presentation, should this drug be covered by insurance? Clinical Trials: Given the patient presentation, what clinical trials are the eligible for?
Cost of Care: What is the expected cost of medical services this patient will require?

Atropos announced the completion of a seed funding round in the fall of 2020, by a group of institutional and individual investors including Boston Millennia Founders Fund. Atropos was also selected as a participant in StartX 2020. Financial details have not been disclosed.