Vancouver-based PHEMI Health Systems has announced its $2.8 million seed round, lead by the Business Development Bank of Canada (BDC Venture Capital), Yaletown Ventures and several angel investors.
PHEMI will use the funding to commercialize PHEMI Clinical – a patient care management platform that dramatically improves clinic productivity and patient outcomes, and PHEMI Central – a next generation data warehouse based on Big Data technology that incorporates sophisticated Privacy By Design principles to meet the unique demands of healthcare.
We last wrote about PHEMI in January, when reporter John Gray detailed how the company’s technological “prescription” for fixing the health care system just might be its “silver bullet”. PHEMI had just signed an agreement to work with German software giant SAP, where the power of the SAP HANA enterprise platform would be combined with the privacy infrastructure of PHEMI. It “will allow healthcare professionals to analyze vast amounts of data”, in PHEMI’s system which is the first to guarantee the privacy of sensitive patient information in its products.
This is all important because about a month after our coverage, it was reported that the British Columbia Centre for Excellence in HIV /AIDS at St. Paul’s Hospital in BC is developing an in-memory big data platform using PHEMI and SAP.
“Over 70 percent of healthcare information is unstructured and difficult to mine for relevant insight using traditional methods,” said PHEMI CEO Dr. Paul Terry. “PHEMI changes that. What we’re offering now, essentially, is the ability to turn virtually any piece of patient information – physician letters, lab results, imaging, medication, previous treatment plans – into searchable information, thereby unlocking vast amounts of new data for clinicians, analysts and researchers to extract insights from. PHEMI helps turn healthcare data into strategic assets.”
Yaletown Venture Partners’ Mike Satterfield said that early results from PHEMI’s pilots had been “outstanding”. “PHEMI has an ambitious vision to bring privacy and security to Big Data, a bold approach that is set to change healthcare delivery models across North America.”
