As hospitals, governments, private firms and healthcare providers around the world battle the coronavirus, a collection of companies in which Intel Capital has invested – all of them small to medium-sized – offer products and services to help in the fight.
Intel Capital, the company’s venture capital firm and one of the world’s largest, estimates that it has invested more than $100 million in recent years in companies with technology-related solutions to help address the world’s most severe pandemic in more than a century.
Healthcare providers at Houston Methodist Hospital monitor patients via Medical Informatics Corp.’s Sickbay platform, which can turn hospital beds into virtual ICUs in minutes.
Crowded beside a patient’s bed in a typical intensive care unit (ICU) is a constellation of medical technology: monitors, ventilators, extracorporeal membrane oxygenation devices, alarms and more. Each of these devices is spitting out critical patient info — in unconnected streams of data. That’s a problem.
An FDA-cleared software product called the Sickbay™ Clinical Surveillance and Analytics Platform solves this. It was created by Intel Capital-funded Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC), based in Houston. Sickbay™ gathers a patient’s key ICU data to provide single and multipatient near-real-time dashboards as well as full retrospective data views.
The result: doctors, nurses and others can check on a critically ill patient’s well-being in a single glance – from afar. In this way, a single provider can keep eyes on up to 100 patients at once or create a personalized patient watchlist across units, facilities and vendors – and virtually from an office or home.
“Our virtual ICU” is based on the Sickbay platform, Dr. Roberta Schwartz with Houston Methodist Hospital recently told Becker’s Health IT. This means that “many of our providers can see the patients via virtual visits and not risk exposure in our ICU rooms,” she said.
Other hospitals across the country currently use Sickbay for flexible remote monitoring. The same hospitals are now leveraging Sickbay to rapidly scale bed capacity for COVID-19, extend staff capacity and protect providers from exposure. Sickbay unlocks data hospitals have never had access to before so they can use artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to create their own analytics.
Under MIC’s Scale to Serve Program and as part of Intel’s $50 million Pandemic Response Technology Initiative (PRTI), Intel and MIC are talking to hospitals across the U.S. to enable them to quickly deploy Sickbay and protect their critical care providers. Intel is funding the implementation fees and MIC is waiving the software subscription licensing fees for the first 90 days for the first 100 hospitals that qualify for the Scale to Serve Program. (Learn more about applying on the Intel Newsroom.)
VeriSIM Life helps speeds drug development
In the search for new virus-fighting drugs or vaccines, Intel Capital-funded VeriSIM Life has developed a software platform that can help speed the discovery of new pharmaceuticals.
The system from the 2-year-old San Francisco-based biotech startup can model experimental test results of thousands of drug compounds in hours, speeding the time to when human trials can begin and new drugs can reach the market.
In a recent Medium post, VeriSIM Life writes that the company “utilizes computational methods which simulate human & animal physiological phenomena that quickly identify & prioritize the solutions that have the highest probability of preclinical & clinical success.”
VeriSIM Life’s approach to drug development largely replaces animal testing with biosimulation — an approach that draws on large existing datasets from prior animal and human research to help developers model how a new drug will likely interact with the human body.
Other Intel Capital-funded companies addressing the pandemic
Other Intel Capital-funded companies addressing the coronavirus pandemic include those with technology to help hospitals smartly route high volumes of patient calls, to deliver county-by-county level coronavirus contagion prediction and to help software developers quickly test new medical-related mobile apps.
This list shows Intel Capital firms with technology to help address the coronavirus pandemic.
1 amenity Amenity Analytics develops cloud-based text analytics solutions using natural language processing (NLP) and machine learning. Founded in 2015, Amenity currently has more than 50 employees. It is headquartered in New York City and has an R&D office in Tel Aviv, Israel. Gartner named Amenity Analytics a 2018 “Cool Vendor” in AI for banking and financial services. Using Amenity’s suite of NLP solutions, the company created a health epidemic tracker that analyzes earnings call transcripts to assess how public health outbreaks like the coronavirus epidemic can affect business operations and economic conditions.
2 anodot Business metrics are notoriously hard to monitor because of their unique context and volatile nature. Anodot’s Business Monitoring platform uses machine learning to constantly analyze and correlate every business parameter, providing real-time alerts and forecasts, in their context.
Its patented technology is used by many Fortune 500 companies, from digital business to telecom. Anodot can reduce the time it takes for detection and resolution of revenue-critical issues by as much as 80%.
With the COVID-19 outbreak, Anodot is leveraging its platform to keep its employees and the public updated on the pandemic. It has created an online tracker that can monitor cases and also provide updates to users when a region’s case count has changed drastically.
3 avaamo Avaamo is a developer of an enterprise conversational artificial intelligence platform designed to reinvent the way people communicate, transact and work. The company’s platform combines artificial intelligence, machine learning, conversation design and integration with legacy enterprise workflows, enabling enterprises to simplify the time needed to design and deploy enterprise bots or virtual assistants to employees and customers.
Avaamo has deployed conversational AI for healthcare in the UCHealth healthcare system. Its platform can assist with the tools and platforms hospitals will need to quickly adapt to care for the higher volume of patients as a result of COVID-19. Its platform allows hospitals to respond to patient questions as well as community questions and needs (i.e., where to get tested, questions about symptoms).
4 cloudleaf Cloudleaf provides end-to-end solutions for supply chain visibility enabling real-time decisions. The company’s Digital Visibility Platform combines the power of the internet of things (IoT), AI/ML and cloud computing to address use cases such as asset tracking, cold chain management and condition monitoring. This enables visibility and analytics across multiparty supply chains from raw materials to manufacturing to finished product delivery and all the transportation steps in between.
5 datarobot DataRobot was founded in 2012 under the belief that artificial intelligence is the defining innovation of our time and will fundamentally reshape our future. Today, DataRobot is one of the leading platforms for enterprise AI, partnering with government, commercial and nonprofit organizations around the world to deliver value from data at scale.
6 duality Duality is a developer of a data collaboration solution designed to protect privacy, intellectual property and regulation compliance. The company’s platform enables users to apply artificial intelligence and advanced analytics on sensitive digital assets without revealing the actual data, even when analyzed by partners and third parties.
7 echopixel EchoPixel combines augmented reality (AR) and artificial intelligence to help physicians simplify diagnosis and procedures by providing an interactive 3D holographic experience. When clinical teams work with patient-specific anatomy in an open 3D space, it gives them smart insights into a patient’s unique challenges and treatment opportunities.
8 healx Healx is an artificial intelligence-powered and patient-inspired technology company, accelerating the discovery and development of rare disease treatments. Its AI drug discovery platform leverages public and proprietary biomedical data, and features the world’s leading knowledge graph for rare diseases.
9 k4connect K4Connect is a mission-driven company creating solutions that serve older adults and those living with disabilities. The company’s solutions are built upon FusionOS (“the operating system for where you live”), a patented software and IoT integration platform employing an edge-cloud hybrid architecture designed to be open, modular and scalable.
10 medicalinf Founded in 2010, Medical Informatics Corp. is setting a new standard of care founded on software-based patient monitoring, real-time predictive analytics and patient-centered healthcare. The company’s FDA-cleared Sickbay™️ clinical surveillance and analytics platform created for ICUs unlocks and processes all patient data that is currently thrown away, specifically, the 800,000 samples an hour of waveform monitoring data from disparate critical care bedside devices.
11 mesmer Mesmer, the leader in RPA in Development (RPAD), uses artificial intelligence-powered bots to speed up software development. Engineers offload time-consuming tasks to bots, starting with mobile app testing. Deep learning automation (DLA) enables bots to autonomously interact with mobile applications to find customer experience bugs.
12 revealbio Reveal Biosciences is creating artificial intelligence technologies for the analysis of whole-slide pathology images that can increase accuracy, reproducibility and scale. Reveal Biosciences’ platform can help in the analysis of biopsies by pathologists in a remote setting during the COVID -19 crisis. It can also aid in the quantitative analysis of pathology slides for COVID-19 therapies using repurposed molecules.
13 sprinklr Sprinklr is the world’s leading Customer Experience Management (CXM) platform, providing enterprise software that helps organizations reach, engage and listen to customers across 36 modern social and messaging channels. Founded in 2009, the company has grown to 1,800 employees globally, supporting more than 1,000 of the world’s largest and most valuable brands – from Philips to McDonald’s to Microsoft.
14 synthego Synthego is a genome engineering company that enables the acceleration of life science research and development by leveraging machine learning, automation and gene editing to build platforms for science at scale. The company recently launched multiple genome engineering tools that can enhance COVID-19 research and development effectiveness by providing scientists with agile CRISPR-based technology to enable more rapid research and development of COVID-19 diagnostics, therapeutics and vaccine.
15 verisim VeriSIM Life is a developer of disease-specific simulation models that have the goal of replacing animal drug testing by using artificial intelligence. The company’s models use intelligence-driven biosystem simulations to truly personalize patient treatment, enabling pharmaceutical scientists to improve the accuracy and efficiency of drug development and make personalized healthcare a reality.
