MedAware Raises $1 Million to Bring Big Data Analytics to Medical Prescription Market

RA'ANANA, Israel, October 2, 2014 /PRNewswire/ --

MedAware, a developer of big data analytics for the medical prescription market, announced today that it has completed a $1 million Series A financing round led by equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd. Together with GE Ventures, it is the two firms' first co-investment since entering into a strategic partnership in November 2013, and GE's first software investment in Israel's growing healthcare industry. The money raised will be used to drive initial sales to healthcare providers, insurance companies and large pharmacy chains.

Today, prescription errors result in morbidity, mortality and wasteful healthcare costs, harming hundreds of thousands of people annually in the United States alone. To combat the prevalence of those errors, MedAware has developed an innovative software-based solution that combines the power of big data analytics and machine learning to save lives and reduce medical costs.

"Three years ago I came across a tragic case of a nine-year-old Israeli boy who died because his primary-care physician accidentally prescribed the wrong drug," said MedAware Co-founder and CEO Gidi Stein. "The ease with which a little boy died because of a mistaken click of a button was horrifying to me as a physician and as a parent. We have founded MedAware in order to try and prevent such cases."

Current solutions such as electronic medical records and computerized physician order entry systems search for prescription errors based on manually predefined rules.  These systems miss errors that do not fall into their known rules, and also suffer from high false-alarm rates.  By contrast, MedAware uses big-data analytics and machine-learning algorithms to automatically learn how different clinical scenarios are managed by physicians in real world situations.

"MedAware embodies many of the same technologies we've seen accompany the emergence of the Industrial Internet," added Jason Sibley, Director of Healthcare Ventures at GE Ventures. "From big data and analytics to machine learning and digital communications, the company aligns perfectly with GE's vision for a healthcare industry driven by technology and built for improving lives, and we look forward to working together to help transform the medical prescription market."

"We are excited about the potential for MedAware to solve the huge problem of prescription error via their impressive big data technology," said Jon Medved, founder and CEO of OurCrowd. "The fact that our partner, General Electric, has joined together with us in this investment is further validation of this tremendous opportunity."

About MedAware 

MedAware provides innovative solutions that save lives, improve patient safety and significantly reduce healthcare costs, by identifying and preventing prescription errors in real-time. MedAware's patent-pending technology uses big data analytics and machine learning algorithms to analyze large scale data of Electronic Medical Records (EMRs), to learn automatically how physicians treat patients in real life scenarios. Prescriptions largely deviating from the spectrum of standard treatment patterns are flagged as potential errors with high specificity and low "alert fatigue". MedAware was founded in 2012, and is headquartered in Israel. The company is led by an expert team with extensive clinical, business and technical experience.

http://www.medaware.com/

About OurCrowd 

OurCrowd is the leading hybrid venture capital equity crowdfunding platform for accredited investors who wish to invest in Israeli and global early stage companies. Managed by a team of well-known investment professionals and led by serial entrepreneur Jon Medved, OurCrowd selects opportunities, invests its own capital and brings these startups to its accredited membership. Members choose those deals they invest in via OurCrowd-managed partnerships. OurCrowd investors must meet stringent accreditation criteria and invest a minimum of $10,000 per deal. OurCrowd provides post investment support to its portfolio companies, assigning industry experts as mentors and taking board seats. OurCrowd has raised over $65 million in equity crowdfunding for its 50 portfolio companies which include leading companies, such as: BillGuard, ReWalk, Consumer Physics (SCiO), BioCatch and Abe's Market.

http://www.ourcrowd.com

About GE Ventures 

GE Ventures is an international corporate venture capital unit, based in Silicon Valley, which enables startups, partners and GE to accelerate growth and commercialize innovative ideas that will help make the world work better - to build, power, move and cure. The unique combination of capital, technical and commercial expertise, infrastructure, and the GE global network of businesses and partners, helps our partners to advance industries and improve lives. For more information visit http://www.geventures.com or follow us on Tumblr.

Press contact:
Gidi Stein, MD, Ph.D
Co-Founder and CEO
US tel. +1-617-648-0349
Israel Tel. +972-50-6701124
[email protected]

SOURCE MedAware