Australian health informatics company, Alcidion has raised $1.5 million in Series B funding from Blue Sky Private Equity, Allure Capital and Alcidion co-founders Ray Blight and Malcolm Pradhan.
In 2012, Alcidion was backed by a $2.4 million investment by a fund managed by Blue Sky Private Equity, which helped fund the development of its clinical decision support platform, Miya.
Designed for emergency departments, patient flow and outpatient services, Miya couples a holistic patient profile with customised best practice modules.
This unique combination helps clinical and allied health staff maximise efficiencies, avoid clinical errors and reduce costs.
Clinical Decision Support Systems (CDSS) like Miya are software platforms that integrate patient data with a knowledge base to produce patient-specific output in the form of care recommendations, assessments, alerts and reminders to actively support clinicians in decision-making.
Miya has gone live in several sites, including three Western Health hospitals in Victoria, and Alcidion has since been awarded significant contracts to deploy the platform at the Departments of Health in Tasmania and the Northern Territory.
Why is a platform like Miya relevant today?
Alcidion’s Chief Executive and former Chair of the SA Health Commission, Ray Blight said real-time clinical decision support was one of the most critical challenges facing hospitals.
“As the healthcare industry evolves, hospitals and clinicians need high-precision, high-value decision support at the point-of-care. Health IT will play an integral role in sustainable health care delivery,” Blight said.
Alexander McNab, Director at Blue Sky Private Equity, said increasing pressures were being placed on healthcare around the world as our population grows and ages, especially here in Australia.
“The only way hospitals, clinicians and carers can work sustainably is by using innovative technology to help increase productivity and improve quality of care,” McNab said.
He praised Miya as one of the most significant innovations in clinical decision support the industry has seen in decades and said the newly-raised capital will help bring this breakthrough solution into the mass market.
Blue Sky is investing alongside tech entrepreneur Nathan Buzza, who has helped develop global clinical middleware solutions, and his private equity firm Allure Capital.
“The work of healthcare professionals and clinicians is largely a world of making decisions and solving problems,” he stated. “It is a world of choosing issues that require attention, setting goals, finding and designing suitable courses of action and evaluating and choosing among alternative actions.”
“Clinicians must choose from and interpret a myriad of clinical data, while facing pressure to decrease uncertainty, risks to patients and costs.”
Buzza therefore believes that the true essence of healthcare delivery is decision making — what information to gather, which tests to order, how to interpret and integrate this information into diagnostic hypotheses and what treatments to administer.
He went on to reveal that over the last 25 years, he had come across a lot of technologies which were either poorly implemented or did not hit the mark, but stated that Alcidion stood out from the healthcare tech crowd.
“One of the greatest challenges in healthcare is providing a high quality of interoperability with the myriad of clinical systems that are installed throughout the global healthcare ecosystem, and that’s what Alcidion has done exceptionally well with the Miya platform,” he explained.
What will Alcidion do with this funding?
The introduction of the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPACA) in concert with the Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health Act (HITECH) has placed immense pressure on US hospitals to deploy CDSS.
Beginning in 2016, The US federal government will cut funding to hospitals that have not adopted and deployed this technology.
As a result, IndustryARC estimates that the CDSS market will grow at a CAGR of 21.5 per cent from $USD1.18 billion to $USD4.65 billion by 2018.
This presents Alcidion with an unparalleled and unique opportunity and equally so, it places an immense level of pressure on the business to expand rapidly into North America.
Buzza, who is also an Executive Vice President at Alcidion, told Anthill that in order to capitalize on this opportunity, the funding will be utilised to accelerate their commercialization strategy to expand into the North American marketplace in 2016.
“Series B funding is often considered the hardest round to raise – the unloved valley of slow progress that precedes scaling,” he remarked.
“It can be the no-man’s land of the start-up build phase as the company transitions between a solid technical base and a commercially viable entity.”
Buzza went on to reveal that Alcidion intends to have a US ready business model by the end of this year and that the company is planning on a more substantial Series C round of funding to further accelerate their US market entry early in 2016.