Vital, an Atlanta, GA-based AI-powered software increasing productivity and improving patient health in hospital emergency rooms has raised $5.2M led by First Round Capital and Threshold Ventures (formerly DFJ Venture). The seed round also includes participation from Bragiel Brothers, Meridian Street Capital, Refactor Capital, and SV Angel, with angel investment from Vivek Garipalli, CEO of CloverHealth; and Nat Turner and Zach Weinberg, founders of Flatiron Health. Josh Kopelman, founder, and partner at First Round Capital will join Vital’s board of directors.
Mint.com Founder Launches Vital to Improve Patient Health in Hospital Emergency Rooms
Vital founder and CEO Aaron Patzer brings capital, confidence and credibility to Vital from his success with Mint.com, which transformed dense and illegible bank data into an easy consumer product. The decision to take on an even higher-stakes, more regulated industry came after seeing firsthand the antiquated software hospitals use.
Vital’s HIPAA compliant cloud-based platform sits on top of any existing electronic health record system (EHR) using artificial intelligence (AI) and natural language processing (NLP) to triage patients before they see a doctor, making it easier and faster for providers to coordinate care and prioritize patients with a fast, reliable, and incredibly user-friendly system.
Results from Peer-Reviewed Academic Study
Teaming up with Justin Schrager, Doctor of Emergency Medicine at Emory University Hospital, Patzer invested a million dollars and two years of peer-reviewed academic study that compared logistic regression and neural network modeling strategies to predict hospital admission or transfer following initial presentation to the Emergency Department (ED) triage with and without the addition of natural language processing elements.
Of the 47,200 ED visits from 642 hospitals, 6,335 (13.42%) resulted in hospital admission (or transfer). A total of 48 principal components were extracted by NLP from the reason for visit fields, which explained 75% of the overall variance for hospitalization. The study reveals the predictive accuracy of hospital admission or transfer for patients who presented to ED triage overall was good and was improved with the inclusion of free text data from a patient’s reason for visit regardless of the modeling approach. Natural language processing and neural networks that incorporate patient-reported outcome-free text may increase predictive accuracy for the hospital admission.
Plans for Funding
Vital used the results from the peer-reviewed study and technical research and development to create Vital, now ready to roll out to the benefit of patients, providers and hospitals. The company plans to use the funding to help grow the Vital team of engineers and data scientists, and to bring its secure, cloud-based software to emergency rooms across the United States
“The HITECH Act was well-intentioned, but now hospitals rely on outdated, slow, and inefficient software – and nowhere is it more painful than in the emergency room,” says Vital founder and CEO Aaron Patzer. “Doctors and nurses often put more time into paperwork and data entry than patient care. Vital uses smart, easy tech to reverse that, cutting wait times in half, reducing provider burnout and saving hospitals millions of dollars.”
