Boston-based health outcomes and tech company OM1 has just announced that it raked in $21 million in a Series B financing round led by Polaris Partners with participation from existing investors including General Catalyst and 7wire Ventures. This brings the company’s total financing to $36 million, according to Crunchbase.
"Healthcare stakeholders are moving rapidly towards recognizing that clinical outcomes are the most important metric in healthcare," Dr. Richard Gliklich, founder and CEO of OM1, said in a statement. "With this funding, OM1 can accelerate the technologies that are making those outcomes accessible, and useful across a spectrum of needs for real world evidence and value-based care."
The company’s primary focus is using artificial intelligence and health information to analyze, synthesize and leverage big clinical data. The idea is to use the information to help customer compare and predict health outcomes.
The latest funding is expected to help the company build out its platform. It gave the example of its new product the OMView RA system, which gives users access to comparative treatment outcomes across all major biologics and biosimilarities in rheumatoid arthritis.
The company was founded in 2015 by Gilklich and received $15 million in Series A funding in April 2017.
As part of the funding announcement, Dave Barrett, managing partner at Polaris, will be joining the board of directors at OM1.
"Applying advanced technologies to make treatment outcomes data actionable is game changing. OM1 is driving a new paradigm that promises better decision-making for healthcare and life sciences organizations," Barrett, said in a statement.
The use of AI and big data has been a well-funded trend this year. As of January 2018, corporate funding for AI hit the $1 billion mark.
Even top government officials are starting to look at how the technology could shape the healthcare industry. Earlier this month the White House hosted a summit on AI for American Industry. While these discussions had a heavy focus on research and development, many are looking to the technology for a predictive analysis.
The British government, for example, is also starting to take a look at using big data combined with AI as a predictive tool for disease. Earlier this week, Prime Minister Theresa May announced a plan to invest in AI technology development for the healthcare sector as part of her industrial strategy. The plan will look specifically at using the National Health data sets to help diagnose cancer earlier on.
