Agamon, a healthcare AI startup, announced today a $3M seed round, led by MMC Ventures, with the participation of InHealth Ventures, Seedcamp, and Bayer G4A.
Agamon is already working with leading U.S hospitals including Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health System, Detroit-based Henry Ford Health System, and other hospitals outside the US.
Hospitals run like a relay race, where many procedures and work stations must exchange real-time clinical information to ensure patient care runs smoothly. Today, this optimal patient care is threatened by something seemingly trivial, and that is textual clinical reporting, exposing hospitals to human error and lack of coordination.
“The inability of today’s computers to understand doctors’ unique way of writing has been a major issue. Doctors can correctly describe an ‘infiltrating mass’ without writing the word ‘tumor’ or write ‘bilateral ground glass peripheral opacity’ without explicitly indicating a suspicion for COVID-19” says Michal Meiri, the CEO and Co-founder of Agamon.
“This language is effective for fast and efficient note-taking, which is critical, but makes tracking and managing treatments impossible for a computer.
Dr. Danie Siegal, Vice Chair of Radiology at Henry Ford Health System says, “Agamon has built advanced AI and NLP that assess the significance of findings extracted from unstructured medical text, starting with radiology reports. This helps us make sure no important clinical recommendation ever falls through the cracks, and will assist with automating timely review of large report volumes.
Tom Moon, physician and investor at MMC Ventures, comments: “We’re delighted to back Michal and the Agamon team as we continue to invest in data driven healthcare start-ups. We’re excited by Agamon’s ability to automate the interpretation of medical text and therefore enable products such as automatic follow up and patient friendly reports.
“Applications at the intersection of machine learning and healthcare data are helping drive much needed change in our healthcare systems and are a core part of our investment thesis at MMC.”
Agamon plans to use the funding to scale their deployments with more hospitals globally and further train the AI and widen its clinical spectrum.