Pathway, a Montréal-based Healthtech startup, has raised $1.6 million CAD in its first round of financing to bolster its clinical guidance platform.
Participating investors include Desjardins Venture Capital, Amplify Capital, Panache Ventures, BoxOne Ventures, and Formentera Capital.
Founded in 2018 by tech and healthcare entrepreneurs Jonathan Hershon Saint-Jean, Louis Mullie, and Christophe Marois, Pathway offers healthcare professionals a mobile application to facilitate the diagnosis and treatment of patients.
“The idea for Pathway came as Dr. Mullie was finishing his residency in internal medicine and critical care,” said Saint-Jean. “With the explosion of medical knowledge, making it unrealistic for anyone to keep up with all the advances, it was with our friend [Marois] that we came up with Pathway.”
“To provide high-quality care, clinicians must have rapid access to relevant evidence when clinical questions arise.”
On average, a general practitioner would need to read 21 hours a day to keep up with primary care literature alone, according to a study published in the Journal of the Medical Library Association. Further, the report revealed that physicians trained in epidemiology would take an estimated 627.5 hours per month to evaluate the thousands of active medical journals and articles.
“To provide high-quality care, clinicians must have rapid access to relevant evidence when clinical questions arise,” the study wrote.
In an effort to increase healthcare efficiency, Pathway is leveraging AI and big data to create a medical knowledge platform and software solutions that drive evidence-based medicine into clinical practice.
The new capital is earmarked for hiring more doctors to review content and expand disease coverage; employing engineers to enhance the mobile app and develop its enterprise offering; and expanding Pathways’ outreach to the global market.
With interactive “pathways,” the company provides a knowledge base that guides health care professionals to cut down on time curating diagnostic approaches and treatments for their patients. Currently, Pathway offers 33 medical specialties, over 1,000 guidelines, and more than 45,000 graded recommendations.
According to the company, every piece of information published in Pathway has been vetted by at least three clinicians.
Pathway is currently working on launching the enterprise version of its point of care technology and conducting research on finding a way to optimize clinical workflows and facilitate evidence-based care in hospital systems. The company revealed that it’s already in the works with partners in the United States and other countries.
