Since its launch in 2021, Regard says its technology has surfaced more than three million diagnoses to care teams and generated more than $50 million in incremental revenue for enterprise health system partners.
Clinical decision software company Regard pocketed $61 million in series B funding to scale its reach in healthcare as investors have a growing appetite for AI-powered startups.
Regard developed an AI "co-pilot" for physicians that streamlines documentation and helps diagnose medical conditions, and the company has inked partnerships with a number of large health systems.
Oak HC/FT led Regard's series B financing round with participation from Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures, as well as existing investors TenOneTen Ventures, Calibrate Ventures and Techstars.
Regard, formerly HealthTensor, raised $5 million in a seed round in 2021 and picked up $15.3 million in a series A funding a year later. The company is now valued at $350 million, TechCrunch reported.
The company plans to use the fresh capital to accelerate product development with its core clinical insights platform and invest in fundamental research in large language models (LLMs).
Regard also wants to expand beyond inpatient facilities, according to executives.
Last year, the company announced a partnership with OpenAI to release new core product functionalities and a new chatbot, Max, built on OpenAI’s LLM, GPT-4.
Regard says it aims to unlock the massive troves of clinical data to help provide insights to physicians. According to The World Economic Forum, less than 3% of available patient data is used by a physician. With an average of 50,000 data points per patient, the gap between the vast amount of data available and clinically actionable insights generated from it is significant, according to executives.
"Imagine a doctor having all the EHR information they need about a patient, right in front of them, in just seconds. Regard is augmenting patient care by analyzing overwhelming mountains of clinical data and providing clinicians with potential diagnoses and treatment recommendations, impacting the quality and safety of care in real-time," said Eli Ben-Joseph, CEO at Regard, in a statement. "That's a game-changer—not just for doctors, but for the people whose lives are in their hands."
Regard designed its platform to analyze all available data and recommend diagnoses to hep drive better patient care. The company's software also streamlines clinical documentation in a standardized format, a critical step to ensure clinical quality and enhance hospital revenue, executives said.
Since its launch in 2021, Regard's technology has surfaced more than three million diagnoses to care teams and generated more than $50 million in incremental revenue for enterprise health system partners including Banner Health and Sentara. The company also signed partnerships with WakeMed Health & Hospitals.
"Cedars-Sinai has been working alongside Regard from the early days of the business because we saw a real need to empower physicians with the data that can provide critical analysis and insights to assist in diagnosis and treatment," said Maureen Burgess, partner at Cedars-Sinai Health Ventures, in a statement. "And, even more importantly, we believe it will improve patient care as well as the patient experience."
Banner Health plans to roll out Regard’s tool in a phased approach to all 33 acute-care hospitals in its system across six states in 2024. The technology is an opportunity to increase face time between providers and patients, the partners say.
“Electronic medical records are all-encompassing, and there are good things to that and there are some challenges to that,” Susan Lee, D.O., Banner’s physician executive, told Fierce Healthcare back in March. “Sometimes, pieces of data that clinicians need are difficult to find and could be old.”
As an “elegant search tool,” Lee said Regard recognizes words clinicians use to pull the relevant data from all existing Banner Health records for a particular patient. It can pull out tests, lab data and imaging reports “far, far faster than a human can ever do it.”