Toronto-based PocketHealth, which has developed a platform lets patients securely access and share medical imaging with doctors, has raised $9.1 million CAD ($6.5 million USD) in financing.
COVID-19 has highlighted the need for hospitals and clinics to change the way they share medical images.
This is the first funding round for PocketHealth, which was launched four years ago and was bootstrapped until this point. The round was led by early-stage venture capital firm Radical Ventures and will be used to help the startup accelerate its hiring and meet increased demand for the platform from patients and hospital networks in Canada and the United States.
PocketHealth’s platform allows patients to share imaging records electronically with patients. Since its founding in 2016 by brothers Rishi Nayyar and Harsh Nayyar, the platform has grown to enable direct sharing to hospitals and physicians.
The startup said the COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the need for hospitals and clinics to modernize the way they share medical images. In the last month, PocketHealth has increased the number of sites deploying its platform by 300 percent. The tool has been used by over 500 hospitals and clinics, as well as over 150,000 patients to manage more than175 million medical images.
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Requiring patients to travel to healthcare facilities to pick up a CD, as is the case in most hospitals, is not possible in the current climate, PocketHealth said. Demand for the platform has been particularly high in the United States, where existing virtual image sharing solutions have been unable to break the industry’s reliance on CDs.
Jordan Jacobs, co-founder and managing partner at Radical Ventures, said PocketHealth is removing hard costs and friction for healthcare providers while letting patients participate in their care. He added that he was impressed by the team’s focus on patient-centred care, privacy, and security.
Image source Unsplash. Photo by National Cancer Institute.