Biofourmis Pulls in $300M to Scale Up Virtual Care Offerings
Boston-based Biofourmis has raised $300 million to scale up its virtual care offerings, including delivering personalized and predictive in-home care to a growing number of acutely ill patients and expanding its recently announced virtual specialty care services to those patients with complex chronic conditions.
The company has raised a total of $445 million in funding to date. The new funding is led by General Atlantic. CVS Health (NYSE: CVS) and existing investors also participated in the round. They include SoftBank Vision Fund 2, Openspace Ventures, Mass Mutual Ventures, Sequoia Capital and EDBI.
Biofourmis plans to fund clinical trials to advance the development of digital therapies that work in conjunction with high-value drugs to improve efficacy, while forming strategic partnerships with companies in the digital health and virtual-first care ecosystems. Through these relationships, the company plans to accelerate the growth of its virtual care platform, Care@Home, which enables providers and payers to remotely manage patients across the entire care continuum.
Biofourmis also announced that former Medtronic CEO and Chairperson at Intel, Omar Ishrak, Ph.D., will join the company’s board of directors as chairman.
“We are excited to partner with General Atlantic, which shares our vision for the future of virtual care and the urgency to bring the Biofourmis solution to customers and patients across the globe,” said Kuldeep Singh Rajput, founder and CEO of Biofourmis, in a statement. “We are also thrilled to have Dr. Ishrak join our board. His vast experience, which includes leading one of the world’s most successful medical technology companies, will be an incredible asset as we look to take our business to the next growth phase.”
Biofourmis distinguishes its solutions from traditional remote patient monitoring because they use a blend of passive inputs via continuous monitoring devices, active inputs from episodic monitoring devices, and patient feedback on activity driven through the Biofourmis app to get a complete picture of the patient’s status. Designed to be used at home, in acute, post-acute, and chronic care, Biofourmis’ solution compares the patient as they are today to their normal state.
Healthcare Innovation recently interviewed a rural health system starting to use Biofourmis’ platform. Blessing Health System, a three-hospital health system in rural Illinois, Missouri and Iowa, is piloting a hospital-at-home service in a rural setting. “The patients have a tablet, and they have a sticker that goes on their chest, which allows me to see their ECG monitor, their heart rate, the respiratory rate, and their pulse-ox 24/7,” says Mary Frances Barthel, M.D., chief quality and safety officer at Blessing. “A Bluetooth-enabled blood pressure cuff allows me to see their intermittent blood pressure readings. I can see that information from my laptop or cell phone, so that allows me to really closely monitor these patient's condition.”
Continuously streaming data from the wearables and electronic patient-reported outcomes (ePROs) are fed into the Biofourmis artificial-intelligence (AI)-powered Biovitals Analytics Engine, which establishes a personalized patient baseline via machine learning and delivers real-time notifications to providers as patient conditions change.
