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Venture Launched to Reduce Chronic Hospitalizations

Electrocardiogram (Jon/Picasa)
(Jon/Picasa)

10 November 2014. Sentrian, a new enterprise in Aliso Viejo, California, announced its launch today to offer a system combining personalized remote patient monitoring and cloud-based analytics that reduces what it calls preventable hospitalizations. The company also raised $12 million in early-stage venture funds.

A spin-off from Singularity University, a Silicon Valley technology training organization and incubator, the company’s launch was announced today at Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine meeting in San Diego.

Sentrian aims to better monitor individuals with chronic diseases, identified by physicians and medical records as at risk of deteriorating conditions, and who could benefit from remote monitoring. The individuals are asked to wear miniature and inexpensive sensors and monitoring devices to track their health indicators, which are selected, set, and calibrated by clinicians, with patients trained in their operation.

The Remote Patient Intelligence platform, as its called, feeds data collected by devices into a cloud-based data store. Sentrian says personalized rules-based algorithms and models then assess each patient’s data with the individual’s own medical record, as well as population-based benchmarks and indicators to alert for trends needing attention. The system notifies case workers and clinicians when action is needed.

Sentrian is founded by Jack Kreindler is a physician and physiologist who established a clinic in London for elite athletes and extreme sports enthusiasts that combines personalized monitoring and analytics to achieve higher competitive performances. Sentrian, says Kreindler in a company statement, aims to take advantage of the proliferation and dramatically lower prices of medical monitoring devices to apply those same principles to people with chronic diseases, “bridging the chasm between patients at home and providers in clinics and hospitals – transforming the very way medicine manages disease.”

The company is co-founded by Dean Sawyer, Sentrian’s CEO and an entrepreneur active in enterprises taking advantage of electronic health records technologies. Sawyer is also an early graduate of Singularity University’s Exponential Medicine executive program. Sentrian’s chief medical scientists is Martin Kohn, who served in the same role at IBM’s research division, and led the application of IBM’s Watson supercomputer to health care.

Sentrian says it raised $4 million in seed funds, and another $8 million its first venture funding round. The venture round was led by Reed Elsevier Ventures, Frost Data Capital, and TELUS Corporation.

The company says it is testing the Remote Patient Intelligence platform with thousands of patients in larger health insurance plans, and expects to reveal results of those tests in 2015. In the following video, Kreindler tells more about Sentrian.

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