Videra Health Raises $3 Million in Seed Funding
On November 11, 2021, Videra Health announced it has raised $3 million in seed funding to address the dearth of patient-provider engagement between appointments. The round was led by Peterson Ventures, with participation from Rose Park Advisors and OATV. Videra Health hosts thousands of patient engagements every month for behavioral health providers nationwide to power more personalized, effective care. The remote patient video monitoring startup will use the funds to expand the platform and accelerate its go-to-market strategy by bringing on sales and marketing talent.
“Even before COVID-19, behavioral health was woefully underfunded and understaffed," says Loren Larsen, founder and CEO of Videra Health. "As the mental health crisis mounts, more and more patients need to be seen by current providers. It is critical to equip providers with a scalable way to gain insights about patients both at and between appointments, the latter of which is traditionally a black box to providers. Our asynchronous telehealth platform opens this black box, giving behavioral health specialists easy-to-access, actionable patient data, so they have deeper insights about patients across the continuum of care.”
The company says 91 percent of providers believe remote patient monitoring and post-discharge surveys are essential. Meanwhile, 86 percent of patients are interested in more engagement between appointments, according to company data. Videra Health customers report gathering more and higher quality patient data to fuel better care interactions and interventions, even while saving approximately 88% of staff time.
“We believe that AI will play an increasingly important role in the future of healthcare,” said Ben Capell, Managing Director with Peterson Ventures. “The Videra Health team is using AI to enable providers to close the widening gap in engagement between patient visits. Their mission and their platform is already positively impacting the behavioral health category, and has the potential to reach more broadly in the years ahead as patient-centered care paradigms take hold.”
Larsen points to overworked healthcare providers already feeling a high level of stress due to COVID and labor shortages in general. "Everyone in healthcare is overworked and stressed. Providers are burning out. Mental health care needs have risen dramatically, especially over the last two years. What we're doing makes the system more efficient, and deliver treatment to more people quickly," says Larsen. "We can enable a healthcare provider to spend only 30 seconds looking at a patient's data on our platform to see a clear summary of that patient's status. That patient has been reporting in over a period of time when the information is fresh and current. The record of the patient reporting in makes the treatment much more effective. The alternative is a long, drawn out information gathering process during the next appointment."
Videra's platform is FDA-registered and connects providers and patients anytime, anywhere between visits and post-discharge. Patients are invited to check in with their provider by answering healthcare assessment questions as well as answering via video. The AI-based platform then extracts both quantitative and qualitative patient data and organizes and analyzes that data quickly to assist with clinical decision-making.
When a patient records a selfie video on the app, as shown above, the Videra platform looks for key phrases suggesting emotional distress, such as "I can't take it anymore," and other ways of speaking that a clinician would notice. Traditional approaches would involve giving the patient a big survey to fill out, 15 to 20 questions, to measure depression and anxiety. "We're saying you don't need to take those written tests," says Larsen. "Instead, we can listen to the patient talk and predict how they're doing. By listening to the patient answer open-ended questions about how they're doing, and applying AI through our platform, we'll predict where they are on standard depression and anxiety measures such as PHQ-9 or GAD-7. We can currently predict depression, anxiety, emotional distress, and suicide risk, using AI. In the future we believe we will be able to also predict the onset of dementia, Parkinson's Disease, and even glaucoma from analyzing the patient's eyes from the video. Our vision is to get a readout of many biomarkers from a small amount of open-ended data." says Larsen.
Videra Health currently has 15 employees, most of whom work from its Orem office. It plans to expand the team in the coming months. The company has 17 customers, approximately 1,500 patients and has recorded over 10,000 patient interactions. Customers consist mostly of behavioral health hospitals and addiction recovery centers. "It's the large behavioral health hospitals that discharge dozens or even hundreds of people per week that have the biggest challenges in following up with those discharged patients. Even when providers try to reach out to patients via phone or text they are connecting only 10 or 15% of the time. People are busy. They don't always take the call or respond to a text. Technology can help solve that problem." said Larsen.