CED Member News: IMPATHIQ Raises Seed Round from Cofounders Capital

IMPATHIQ Raises Seed Round from Cofounders Capital for EMR-Integrated, Cost-Saving, Clinical Decision Support Tool

IMPATHIQ’s IQ Engine improves patient outcomes and saves a hospital system over $3 million in first year of use while improving patient outcomes

IMPATHIQ, a human informatics company created by Wake Forest School of Medicine professors, has raised a seed round of funding from the tech venture fund Cofounders Capital in Cary, NC.   IMPATHIQ will use the funding to continue to develop intelligently integrated electronic medical record (EMR) clinical decision support solutions for hospitals to improve health outcomes and reduce healthcare costs.

IMPATHIQ’s treatment pathways are powered by their novel IQ Engine — a sophisticated and scalable data informatics platform that integrates with EPIC, Cerner, and other EMRs utilizing FHIR interoperability standards.  The company’s IQ Engine enables hospitals and clinicians to implement behavior changing clinical pathways into EMR-integrated web applications rapidly, track health outcomes, perform quality assurance and auditing, and do this all in an affordable manner.

Their first clinical solution built on the IQ Engine is HEART Pathway, a proprietary algorithm for patients who present to the Emergency Room with chest pain. HEART Pathway was created and validated by Wake Forest researchers with over $1M in grant funding and has been published upon extensively.   A randomized clinical trial published in the American Heart Association’s journal Circulation demonstrated that, when compared to usual care protocols, HEART Pathway was able to reduce the number of observation status admissions, reduce hospital length of stay by 12 hours per patient, and increase early discharge of patients with chest pain, while also keeping the miss rate to less than 1%, which is dramatically superior to existing chest pain algorithms. HEART Pathway has a proven track record with utilization in over 15,000 patients to date, saving one hospital over $3.5m in unnecessary healthcare expenditure in one year alone.

“What separates IMPATHIQ from other health informatics companies are two things.  One, the pathways are grounded in published research and evidence.  Two, unlike other companies that merely collect data, the IQ Engine knows how to make that data intelligent and actionable for hospitals that want to create their own custom pathways,” says Iltifat Husain, MD, Co-founder and CEO of IMPATHIQ.  “If a hospital wants to improve how it treats a certain condition, such as sepsis, they can use our Sepsis Pathway app or work with us to create their own clinical decision support tool into an EMR-integrated web app.  Our IQ Engine would then deliver daily results on how sepsis is being managed in the hospital, along with the health outcomes related to utilization of the sepsis tool in their EMR.  Basically, we’re enabling hospitals to significantly increase the functionality of their EMRs with our plug-and-play platform, and allowing them to do it in a scalable, cost-effective manner.

One of the first hospital systems to implement HEART Pathway and the IQ Engine within their EMR is Cambridge Health Alliance (CHA).  CHA wanted to streamline chest pain care across all of their Emergency Rooms and reduce the number of low risk chest pain admissions (observation status admissions) while also achieving better outcomes for their patients.  “We chose IMPATHIQ and their IQ Engine so that we could gain real time administrative and clinical feedback from our EMR, while also improving how patient care is delivered”, says Christopher Fischer, MD, the Site Chief of Emergency Medicine at Cambridge Hospital.  CHA’s EMR is EPIC and IMPATHIQ is implementing IQ Engine and HEART Pathway utilizing EPIC’s App Orchard, a platform that enables developers to seamlessly integrate into hospital EMRs using FHIR interoperability standards.

“We’ve got to make better use of the statistical data we already have if we are going to improve medical outcome and control soaring healthcare cost,” says David Gardner, Cofounders Capital Managing Partner.  “We believe the real winners in this space will be the companies like IMPATHIQ that empower providers to easily apply the statistically validated knowledge we have to get better and more efficient results for the patients and organizations they serve.  IMPATHIQ is able to create scalable EMR integrated tools that do not tax a hospital’s informatics department and are cost effective — making it a double win for a hospital system.   Also, their proven health outcomes in numerous published studies is a huge differentiator from other companies we’ve seen in this space.”