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Exclusive: TytoCare raises $49 million to build out AI-enhanced chronic care
TytoCare, which offers a virtual care solution enhanced by proprietary devices, announced it has raised $49 million in funding it will use to expand its chronic care offerings and portfolio of diagnostic tools.
The Series D extension round was led by Insight Partners with participation from MemorialCare, Healthcare of Ontario Pension Plan, and Clal. CEO Dedi Gilad told me the funding increases the company’s valuation, and sets the company up with enough runway to break even within several years, and to eventually pursue a public offering or another strategic option.
TytoCare’s Home Smart Clinic solution is a handheld device built around software and attachments that allow people to collect some vital signs and conduct ear, throat, heart, and lung exams at home. The exams can be conducted during a live video consultation with a clinician, or asynchronously, with exams recorded by patients or their caregivers. The company partners with 220 health plans and other risk-bearing organizations who offer TytoCare’s services to encourage subsets of their populations to seek care virtually, rather than go to the doctor’s office. Gilad said that while the most obvious value proposition is in reducing urgent care visits, the company hopes to rewire people’s medical behavior such that people default to virtual for all kinds of care.
TytoCare is now in the process of expanding its model from supporting needs around occasional doctor’s visits to care for conditions that require longer follow-up, including asthma and COPD.
To support these new capabilities and more, TytoCare has been developing analysis tools that take advantage of the company’s connected exam devices to monitor patients over long periods of time and help doctors make diagnoses. Earlier this year, the company received Food and Drug Administration clearance for software that can analyze sounds recorded by its stethoscope attachment for signs of troublesome wheezes, and Gilad said that other new tools are currently in the regulatory pipeline, including ones that can assess the ears, throat, and certain breathing issues. The company expects clearance for many of these tools by early next year.
Gilad believes the company’s technology can help manage “a very big chunk” of people who need to keep tabs on a condition but don’t necessarily need as many costly visits with overburdened clinicians.
$6 million grant to study telehealth treatment for obesity and asthma in children
Researchers at Massachusetts General Hospital have received $6 million to fund a trial studying whether a treatment program for obesity and asthma in children can be just as effective delivered over telehealth as in person.
Funded by the Patient-Centered Outcomes Research Institute, the five-year randomized trial plans to enroll 500 children from “lower-income, racially and ethnically diverse communities” and with body mass index above the 85th percentile and persistent asthma.
MGH was actually forced into an impromptu experiment into virtually delivering its interdisciplinary Healthy Weight Clinic during the pandemic. Lauren Fiechtner, director of pediatric nutrition and the study’s principal investigator, told me that reduced no-show rates, highlighting how logistical challenges may get in the way of treatment for lower income families.
“Coming to these very intensive programs where your child is meeting with a health care provider 26 hours or more per year could be potentially more feasible over telehealth,” she said. “Offering these programs over telehealth has the potential to improve access and reduce disparities for those with other competing demands such as paying for transportation and childcare for other children in the family,”
In addition to learning whether telehealth or in-person care is more effective at reducing BMI and improving asthma control, the study will try to hone implementation strategies for each of the five health centers participating and will later evaluate those efforts.
PCORI recent funding announcements also include $12 million for study of telehealth-delivered lifestyle and exercise programs for people with sleep apnea and COPD, and $4 million to study telehealth primary care for medically fragile children.
AI-aided mammography screening saves time — but does it save lives?
In an interim safety analysis published in The Lancet Oncology, Swedish researchers found that AI-aided mammography reading showed similar performance to the more laborious standard of care. In the study, 80,000 women were randomized to have their mammograms read by either a single radiologist supported by an AI system that scores malignancy risk or by two radiologists, which is standard in Europe. AI-supported reading detected 6 cancers per 1,000 people, compared to 5 cancers per 1,000 for double reading. Importantly, the AI-aided group conducted 36,000 fewer screen reads, potentially saving an enormous amount of time.
Now the research will continue until it reaches 100,000 people with at least two years of follow-up to see how AI systems and standard care compare on the interval cancers that are detected between mammography screenings and tend to have poorer prognosis.
Industry news
- Verily hired Andrew Trister as its new chief scientific officer, I reported exclusively. Trister will lead the Alphabet life science company’s population health efforts, including its work to combat disease-carrying mosquitoes. He joins from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation where he headed up digital health and Covid-19 reponse. Trister was also an early member of Apple’s health team.
- Duke and Microsoft announced a five-year partnership that will support artificial intelligence applications in medicine, with a focus on building out infrastructure such as cloud-based data platforms. Read more from Katie Palmer here.
- Click Therapeutics has launched another trial of its app-based treatment designed to reduce the number of days people have migraines. The randomized trial will examine the effectiveness of the therapy for people on calcitonin-gene-related peptide inhibitor therapy, which the company’s chief medical officer Shaheen Lakhan explained by email is a relatively new class of treatment that targets “underlying physiological mechanisms of migraine.” Click’s RCT launched in March, by contrast, targets people “on acute medications like sumatriptan, or on first- or second-line preventive medications such as propranolol or topiramate.”
- Allurion, the maker of swallowable weight loss balloons, went public on Wednesday via a SPAC merger with Compute Health — the first health tech IPO of 2023. The merger netted Allurion $100 million, which CEO Shantanu Gaur told STAT’s Lizzy Lawrence he aims to put toward the company’s FDA pivotal trial as well as including a generative AI chatbot in its accompanying lifestyle-change software platform. Despite the business threats posed by GLP-1s like Wegovy and Ozempic to device makers, Gaur sees a bright future for Allurion: “We are positioned as an alternative to these drugs or a better first-line therapy for the right type of patient.”
What we’re reading
- Urine drug screening in a telehealth setting for the treatment of opioid use disorder, JAMA Health Forum
- Steve Jobs’s son gets into venture capital, New York Times
- Alarmed by popularity of Ozempic and Wegovy, insurers wage multi-front battle, STAT