Research technology company uMed has raised £3.7m in venture capital to help healthcare providers in the UK and US, including GPs, hospitals and health specialists, run patient research more efficiently and safely.
VC investors AlbionVC, Delin Ventures and Playfair Capital are backing uMed’s latest round of funding, along with Silicon Valley’s 11.2 Capital to reinforce the company’s US presence.
uMed is already delivering its technology to a number of clinical research studies including the University of Oxford-led RAPTOR-C19 study, part of the national priority CONDOR platform evaluating the use of COVID-19 diagnostics in different settings.
RAPTOR-C19 is comparing the accuracy of different rapid tests for Covid-19 among patients in community settings, such as GP surgeries.
These findings are informing the scaling up of testing in the UK, which is a key priority in helping scientists better understand and control Covid-19 transmission.
The uMed platform provides the functionality required to digitally target and engage patients for this study, enabling ‘e-consent’ and the automated capture of structured outcomes remotely which are linked back to the data from each patient record.
This ensures the efficient execution of the study across a large number of sites, and creates the capacity for healthcare providers to participate in more studies.
uMed’s founder and CEO, Dr Matt Wilson, a former NHS anaesthetist and Medical Officer in the Royal Marines, created the technology platform to connect life science researchers with healthcare providers and their patients.
It is already embedded across a global network that includes 1.7 million patients in more than 160 primary care sites in the UK, along with two million patients from a large US health system available from early next year.
uMed’s platform automates the clinical study process, creating regulatory quality patient registries that combine electronic health data with structured data captured from each patient which can include genomic and biomarker samples.
This automation allows all healthcare providers from small GP practices to large hospitals to participate in multiple research programmes simultaneously.
Dr Wilson says: “Our technology can support healthcare providers in finding appropriate patients to participate in medical research including large scale patient registries which usually demands laborious, manual processes on top of their already complex and heavy workloads.
“As our technology is uniquely able to reach back compliantly from the Electronic Health Record (EHR) to the patients, the process for building research registries can be heavily automated. It means clinicians can focus on patient care, while patients are given the opportunity to participate in many more studies from home with full transparency over use of their health records.”
Christoph Ruedig, Partner at AlbionVC, added: “uMed has developed a powerful platform that can link some of the richest sources of healthcare data and drive a step change in how clinical and real-world research is conducted. We have been impressed by the company and its vision, and we are excited to support them as they enter the next stage of growth.”