Understanding a patient’s lifetime journey through the healthcare system is far from a walk in the park, but PicnicHealth aims to organize patient medical records and offer them up as easy-to-digest, real-world datasets for medical product developers.
The company has raised $60 million in venture capital financing to further its work of using machine learning and human curation to absorb complete electronic records into its system, by working directly with patient submissions through an online portal.
This allows them to gather information from across the patient’s healthcare journey, even if they moved between hospitals or health systems during their lives—and allows patients to organize all of their health records from every clinician they’ve visited, including genetic sequencing data, insurance claims records and information gathered by consumer health apps.
After processing, PicnicHealth aims to share that anonymized, longitudinal data with researchers, spanning a range of different illnesses—including hemophilia and sickle cell disease, as well as neurodegenerative conditions such as Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s disease. With the latest proceeds, PicnicHealth said it plans to build 30 new real-world data cohorts.
The company’s series C round was led by B Capital Group. It was joined by Felicis Ventures and Amplify Partners, who previously backed PicnicHealth’s series B round that raised $35 million in August 2020.
“Gaining patient consent isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s the only way to build the complete, longitudinal data needed to truly describe how diseases look in the real world,” PicnicHealth co-founder and CEO Noga Leviner said in a statement.
“This is especially important in our fragmented healthcare system, where the typical PicnicHealth patient has data spread across more than 20 different healthcare providers over seven years,” Leviner added.
The company said it also plans to develop new capabilities for its research data to help drugmakers and clinical trial sponsors connect study data with real-world outcomes.
PicnicHealth has previously worked with Roche and its Genentech division to aggregate patient medical records for biomedical research, including in multiple sclerosis, Huntington’s disease and paroxysmal nocturnal hemoglobinuria. In MS, that includes work spanning about 5,000 patients, collating clinical outcomes and MRI images to explore the progression of the disease.
And last year, it joined forces with Komodo Health to combine their respective real-world evidence databases to support deeper research programs—including by using Komodo’s Healthcare Map to parse PicnicHealth’s collections of information and perform analyses that focus specifically on rarer diseases that may require personalized treatments.