PatchAi has announced that it has closed two rounds of fundraising for about 900 thousand euros during 2019, which will help increase the availability of its empathic virtual assistant to patients participating in clinical trials.
In the last 15 months, the Padua based startup, led by CEO Alessandro Monterosso, has emerged victorious in 10 national and international competitions for over 300 thousand euros in prize money and services. The company has been accelerated by Unicredit Startup Lab and the European Institute of Technology (EIT Health) and now collaborates with international players such as IBM and HIT – University of Padua.
In an era of transition to value-based healthcare, where patient centricity and real-time data generation (RWE) play a key role, the implementation of innovative digital solutions can provide double the value in improving patient care and collecting valuable healthcare data, reducing not only distance and time but also the costs of innovative drug trials.
In this scenario, PatchAi presents itself as the first cognitive platform offering an empathic virtual assistant for the collection and predictive analysis of patient reported data in Clinical Trials, opening the doors to a new frontier in patient engagement through the adoption of conversational ePRO1 (Co-PROTM).
The idea was born in the hospital wards across different countries where the 4 founders – Alessandro Monterosso, Filip Ivancic, Kumara Palanivel and Daniele Farro – worked in clinical research covering different roles (doctors, nurses, pharmacologists) and were able to experience first-hand the unexpressed needs of patients, communication barriers and often obsolete data collection practices.
The team then convened at SDA Bocconi School of Management and, thanks to their participation in the Cariplo Factory’s BioUpper acceleration program, they began working on the implementation of the idea, acquainting themselves with the main stakeholders in the sector.
The company now offers a Class I medical device, pending authorization, that uses technologies such as Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning and integrates an empathic virtual assistant built on IBM® Watson. This technological integration makes it possible to assess patient needs, implement personalised strategies to achieve and maintain patient engagement, and collect valuable real world data on symptomatology, adverse events, therapy adherence and quality of life.
“Our next goal – says PatchAi CEO Alessandro Monterosso – is to invest further in research and product development, continuing to focus on the internationalization of the market outreach and expansion into the B2C segment. All this so that “patient centricity” does not remain merely a concept but is translated into active patient involvement and improvement of their quality of life during clinical trials“.
