DEARhealth, a health tech spin-out from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), announced the closing of Series A funding round with Philips Health Technology Ventures, Vesalius Biocapital III and Health Innovations.

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Image: AI-powered healthcare pathways for personalized continuous care. Photo courtesy of DEARhealth, Inc.

DEARhealth, which provides artificial Intelligence (AI)-powered health pathways for chronic care, is planning to use the €6m (£5.4m) proceeds to scale implementation of its health technology offering to more hospitals.

In addition, the company is also expected to expand its operations to Europe, opening their European headquarters in Amsterdam, Netherlands.

DEARhealth was established in 2012, by Daniel Hommes from UCLA, as a research project aimed at testing data-driven care planning for people with chronic diseases for outcomes, patient and provider experiences, with lower cost.

The company has expanded its offerings to chronic conditions, including pain management, liver diseases, ovarian cancer, chronic kidney diseases, low back pain and many more are in the pipeline.

DEARhealth chief executive officer Daniel Hommes said: “In the first prototypes for Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), we demonstrated that the disease relapse rate as well as ED visits and hospitalizations were significantly decreased. This also had a huge impact on projected costs.”

“We couldn’t be more excited to partner with Philips, Vesalius Biocapital III and Health Innovations at a time where care is transforming so rapidly. DEARhealth is collaborating with companies like Philips to share disease-specific knowledge and expertise in order to maximize value for patients and providers.”

The DEARhealth platform combines the medical knowledge and patient data to predict the best care pathway with the lowest risks and creates a personalised platform for care pathways the patients.

The Series A investment is set to provide platform with validation in multiple care settings across various chronic conditions.

Following the investment, Lara Koole from Philips, Marc Lohrmann from Vesalius Biocapital III and Dick Sietses from Health Innovations would join the board of directors of DEARhealth.

Philips Health Technology Ventures head Rich Wilmot: “We view DEARhealth as an ideal fit within our venture strategy, where we aim to partner with and invest in promising digital health companies complementary to Philips strategic initiatives.

“DEARhealth’s strong potential to accelerate transformation in chronic care towards better outcomes and experiences for patients aligns perfectly, and we look forward to working together to transform care delivery and help the company reach its full potential.”