Hospital quality reporting platform Pharos announced the closing of an oversubscribed $5 million seed round led by Felicis with participation from General Catalyst, Moxxie, and Y Combinator.
Pharos will use this funding to grow its engineering team, enabling customers to report to new clinical quality registries and measure a wider range of process metrics. Launched earlier this year by a team of clinicians and AI researchers, Pharos automates clinical quality reporting for hospitals, enabling submission to state and national quality registries without manual abstraction.
By enabling the automatic extraction of custom process metrics, Pharos helps quality teams identify process failures contributing to patient harm, enabling action on issues like sepsis mortality, hospital-acquired infections, and pressure ulcers.
Brann was previously VP of Data Science at Vital. At Vital, he and Matthew Jones, CTO and co-founder, deployed live predictive AI into 70+ hospitals, integrating with every major electronic health record vendor. While trialing a sepsis model, they recognized AI’s value to hospital quality teams. Brann was previously VP of Quantitative Research at JP Morgan. He has also published papers on sepsis prediction and medical record summarization using LLMs in major medical journals. Jones worked on the Orion Health EHR and grew M2X from inception to international expansion.
The team is also joined by Dr. Alex Clarke, Head of Research, an MD with a PhD in Artificial Intelligence from Imperial College London. He worked as a medical AI researcher at Meta and experienced the time-consuming medical abstraction process firsthand as a resident doctor.
A number of studies have shown that access to data and adherence to processes can significantly impact patient safety. The American College of Surgeons estimates that 60% of current surgical site infections are preventable with good processes, and the same is true for many other patient harm events. Pharos’ goal is to help hospitals prevent this harm before it happens.
KEY QUOTES:
“Today, hospitals spend thousands of hours manually abstracting metrics from unstructured medical records to fulfill registry reporting requirements and understand patient safety events. This manual work is expensive, pulls clinical staff away from the front-line, and means that hospital teams get data long after patients are discharged. Pharos automates abstraction for quality reporting, letting hospitals report to new registries and track metrics that matter to them without adding to clinical reviewer backlogs. We give teams data in real-time, letting them take action on process gaps before they turn into patient harm.”
-Felix Brann, CEO and co-founder of Pharos
“When we met the Pharos team and learned about their deep expertise in both healthcare and AI, we knew we had to work with them. The mundane areas of healthcare administration make up nearly $1 trillion in spend annually. Pharos uses AI to automate the manual process of hospital quality reporting, which is dramatically underinvested in and can have a huge impact on not just savings but patient safety, too. The platform automates manual data abstraction from medical records, enabling hospitals to identify and resolve process failures in real time. With their experience deploying AI in 70+ hospitals and publishing relevant research, we couldn’t imagine a better team to tackle this problem.”
-Ryan Isono, Partner at Felicis
