PatientSafe Solutions, the digital health technology company based in San Diego, says it has inked a couple of deals that mark the company’s first move into markets outside the United States.
The company, which introduced its PatientTouch handheld smart device for nurses in 2011, first announced a Series C round of financing more than a year ago, indicating that the Merck Global Health Innovation fund and other investors had committed $20 million.
Last September, PatientSafe added another $7 million to the round from EDBI, the investment arm of the Singapore Economic Development Board. In January, it raised $3 million as part of a strategic deal with Telus Ventures, the investment arm of Canada’s second-biggest telecom. Altogether, the company has raised over $100 million since it was founded in 2002 as IntelliDot.
PatientSafe CEO Joe Condurso told me by phone that he waited until this week to announce the Telus funding deal so PatientSafe could complete negotiations in a related deal that has made Telus Health the exclusive reseller of PatientTouch system in Canada. “We were working simultaneously through Tellus on a partnership to enter the Canadian market,” Condurso said.
Under their new partnership, Telus also will introduce PatientSafe to its international telecom partners. PatientSafe intends to introduce its PatientTouch technology in Singapore, Malaysia, and Australia, Condurso said.
As part of the deal reached with Singapore’s EDBI last fall, PatientSafe also agreed to consolidate its hardware manufacturing and global supply chain in Singapore, and to establish a PatientSafe office in Singapore to support new product innovation and commercialization in Asian healthcare markets. Condurso said PatientSafe kept its primary product development and design teams in San Diego.
In its statement, PatientSafe says the Telus investment will be used to help expand adoption of the PatientTouch system, which enables nurses and other caregivers to easily communicate and collaborate. Condurso said almost 100 hospitals throughout the United States are using the system now.
The funding also will be used to advance the latest version of the PatientTouch device, a modified Apple iPhone 5 that the company introduced just over a year ago. PatientSafe says its new system unites mobile communications and collaboration capabilities with clinical applications for use at the point of patient care. The first-generation PatientTouch device the company introduced in 2011 was a souped-up Apple iPod Touch customized for hospital duty.
Condurso says the company now offers two branded systems—a clinical communications product that combines the PatientTouch software system with a modified iPhone 5, and the clinical application suite, a software system developed for use on an institution’s devices. As Condurso put it, “The product is finally catching up to the vision.”
