Uniting clinical data worldwide: why we’re partnering with IOMED

IOMED, a Digital Health company based in Barcelona, Spain, recently raised a €2M round from Adara Ventures, with the participation of existing investors Easo Ventures and SpeedInvest.

IOMED provides Data Access for the Hospital industry by connecting and uniting clinical data worldwide. IOMED’s technology accelerates the reuse of clinical data in hospitals enabling them to structure and access patient data more efficiently, whilst maintaining authority over data access and usage. It also allows hospitals to provide a secure and fully anonymized environment for researchers and partner companies to analyze the data.

We are excited to welcome Javier, Gabriel, Álvaro, and the rest of their team to Adara’s portfolio, and we look forward to joining them in their journey to use the latest available technology to help build a more flexible and efficient health system.

The Problem: Healthcare unstructured data - the cause and the remedy for delayed medical advances

The healthcare industry embarked on a path to digitalization decades ago as Health Records, originally handwritten and kept in carbon copies, shifted to electronic records with the advent of IT technologies. This transition from paper to digital has resulted large ordered datasets that have improved efficiency, robustness and quality of the healthcare industry.

However, despite investment in EHRs, hospitals face a large data problem: only 15–25% of the information is structured. This poses a challenge when trying to use big data techniques to carry out clinical research or manage their resources better, as most of the insights are stored in free text format. Consequently, either hospitals shelve those projects or they structure the data manually, a time consuming and highly inefficient administrative task that deters Doctors from engaging in clinical research. Unstructured data obstructs clinical research, and therefore directly delays advances in medicine.

The Solution: Cutting-edge NLP that structures at scale

This is where IOMED changes the rules of the game. The startup has developed a cutting-edge NLP (Natural Language Processing) engine tailored to the healthcare industry to structure text in free format. This is quite an achievement, as the high syntactic complexity inherent to healthcare is precisely what prevents the data being structured when it is first collected.

IOMED’s solution is on-premise, and fully compliant with hospital privacy and ethical standards. At present, almost 30 Spanish hospitals are working with IOMED, freeing valuable resources from tedious administrative tagging, and creating pathways for clinical research to deliver advances in modern medicine in a safe, robust and efficient way.

Our second Digital Health investment

We’ve been investing in innovative B2B solutions for over 15 years now and recently have begun to invest in Digital Health. Whilst the application may be new, we believe there is a massive market opportunity to bring enterprise technology to modern medicine. The healthcare industry is at the centre of a data revolution as it demands to improve efficiency and reduce costs, while continuing to deliver the highest quality patient care and medical research.

We are excited to welcome IOMED to the Adara portfolio, following our first Digital Health investment in Quibim and look forward to partnering with more entrepreneurs in this space.