PolyRemedy, a Concord, MA- and Mountain View, CA-based healthcare startup, has secured $20 million in a new Series C funding to fuel what president and CEO Mark Carbeau calls its “Netflix of wound care” business.
The deal was led by new investor Delphi Ventures of Menlo Park, CA. Previous PolyRemedy backers—MedVenture Associates, Advanced Technology Ventures and Flybridge Capital Partners—also contributed to the round, bringing the company’s funding pot to $47 million.
PolyRemedy has patented material sciences and polymer technology for creating customized dressings for patients with chronic wounds, like diabetic ulcers. The PolyRemedy system can tailor the medicine, moisture level, oxygen permeability, and other factors of the wound dressing to fit different stages of a patient’s care cycle. When Xconomy last caught up with the company, it was offering these treatments via a soda-vending-machine style robotics system that nurses worked with on site at hospitals or wound treatment facilities.
Not anymore. And here’s where the Netflix part comes into play. Now, home nurses interact with the PolyRemedy system via a Web-application on a computer, tablet, or mobile device, inputting factors on the patient’s wound and treatment (in six clicks) to produce the wound dressing recipe, Carbeau says. “The functional parameters are developed to optimize wound healing for that specific day,” he says.
Based on that information,PolyRemedy’s manufacturing facility customizes the dressings and mails them to the nurse agency or patient home, with labels and instructions for which wound dressing corresponds with which day.
“She’s now getting personalized advanced dressing that’s been tailored exactly to that patient,” Carbeau says of the home nurse. “We’ve taken all the variability of care out.”
PolyRemedy currently employs its system via five home health agencies, which manage networks of nurses visiting patients in their homes. The company will use the new funding to develop an asynchronous app (which nurses can access without connection to a cellular network), expand manufacturing, and build a sales and marketing team. It has brought on a new chief commercial officer— Cameron McKennitt of Kinetic Concepts (NYSE: [[ticker:KCI]])—to help lead that effort.
Carbeau, also a Kinetic Concepts veteran, joined PolyRemedy in January 2010 to help shift the startup froma robotics-based healthcare company to one powered by software. “What I brought to the business to was to reorient our business away from traditional medical device company to a technology-enabled services business,” he says.
Back in 2008, PolyRemedy was just beginning to focus on how its system stored information on patients’ wounds and could potentially help better tailor future treatment. Now that’s a big piece of the value the company brings to the table, Carbeau says. The analytics help nurses track trends between treatment and healing and better educate patients.
“We ultimately use that data to make the algorithm smarter and create reports and alerts,” says Carbeau. “That’s what’s defining and driving improved care.”
