- PicnicHealth — a company that gives patients unprecedented access to their medical records and the ability to contribute to scientific research — announced that it raised $35 million in equity financing recently
PicnicHealth — a company that gives patients unprecedented access to their medical records and the ability to contribute to scientific research — announced that it raised $35 million in equity financing recently. This funding includes a new $25 million Series B funding round led by Felicis Ventures and a previously unannounced $10 million Series A led by Amplify Partners in 2018. Amplify also joined in the Series B.
In connection with the funding, Managing Director of Felicis Ventures Sundeep Peechu will join Amplify General Partner Sunil Dhaliwal on the PicnicHealth board. And the investment comes on the heels of PicnicHealth’s recently-announced partnership with Roche and Genentech.
PicnicHealth was launched to help patients with chronic or complex illnesses gain control of their medical records so they can more effectively navigate their healthcare journeys. And to date, PicnicHealth has helped tens of thousands of patients by porting their records from any doctor or EMR in the United States into a single and secure online account.
In July, PicnicHealth announced the launch of the PicnicHealth Research Platform — which allows patients to give consent to share their de-identified data with researchers. And PicnicHealth is able to provide uniquely rich data for research because it works directly with patients and has a scalable data structuring pipeline built on human-in-the-loop machine learning. The result is the first fully patient-consented real-world data set that gives a complete view of each patient’s journey over time and across all of their different medical providers.
PicnicHealth is working directly with patients to give them a tool that provides all of their medical records from any doctor or healthcare system in the US in an easy-to-use, secure online dashboard. Plus patients can choose to contribute their incredibly important data to scientific research — which helps life sciences companies accelerate breakthroughs in care.
PicnicHealth has created a scalable way to transform very messy and often unstructured data into normalized, structured data. And for patients, this means they can see and share records easily with their doctors and caregivers. For researchers, they gain access to data they can’t get anywhere else.
Since healthcare records are full of unstructured text and don’t yet have interoperable standards, this is a difficult technical challenge. So the company has created a solution to collect records at scale, use ML to structure data from those records, and then utilizes clinicians to ensure accuracy where algorithms on their own fall short of rigorous regulatory and clinical standards. The resulting data both trains PicnicHealth’s ML models and is truly useful for patients and researchers alike.
With aggregated, de-identified data, PicnicHealth gives researchers a uniquely rich view of how diseases are experienced by patients and treated by clinicians in the real world well beyond the highly controlled setting of clinical trials. This is useful for understanding things like outcomes across underrepresented groups, treatment patterns outside of academic centers where most research happens, and how disease symptoms change for different groups over their lifetimes. For researchers, the lack of access to this data has slowed efforts to create better treatments that can ultimately improve patient outcomes.
PicnicHealth will use the new funding to move into new disease areas, expanding access to the platform to more patients while building new research data sets. And the company will also focus on building engineering, machine learning, and clinical informatics capacity to scale its regulatory-grade data pipeline.
The company’s also announced recent hires: Richard Kho, Ph.D. joins as Chief Commercial Officer and Luna Federici joins as Chief Operating Officer. Dr. Kho leads PicnicHealth’s commercial organization and its partnerships with life sciences, payers, and academic research organizations. And he joins from Komodo Health where he served as Chief Revenue Officer, and brings 20 years of life sciences experience, including roles at Amgen and Genentech. Federici has joined PicnicHealth from SoFi where she led the company’s $7 billion student loan refinancing business.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our mission at Felicis is to invest in companies that reinvent critical markets such as healthcare research. PicnicHealth embodies this approach, as it is poised to make a massive impact on our ability to treat chronic disease.”
— Sundeep Peechu
“PicnicHealth started as a way to give patients more control navigating their own care. We quickly realized we were actually solving a much bigger problem by turning each patient’s messy, dispersed data into structured data. The result not only helps patients directly but it also really moves the needle on research.”
— Noga Leviner, CEO PicnicHealth — who founded PicnicHealth after managing a Crohn’s disease diagnosis
“PicnicHealth stands alone in the real world evidence market by providing transformative value to patients with chronic conditions and to researchers working on cutting-edge treatments. We were thrilled to partner with the founders early in their journey, and are equally excited to partner once again in support of their explosive growth.”
— Sunil Dhaliwal, General Partner of Amplify Partners
