What You Should Know:
– Inspire Medical Systems has announced its investment in EnsoData, an artificial intelligence (AI) healthcare company helping clinicians uncover disease while patients sleep.
– EnsoData’s technology helps address some of the most intractable problems in healthcare: access and affordability for patients and clinician burnout. By letting doctors and other clinicians use powerful AI to automatically analyze and diagnose diseases while a patient sleeps, EnsoData unlocks more rapid, accurate, and affordable diagnosis and therapy for diseases that plague millions of people – like OSA.
– Over 20 million Americans have OSA, and many go undiagnosed or untreated due to limited capacity for specialty sleep care. This partnership will play an important role in increasing sleep practice capacity to address this growing health challenge.
Empowering Clinicians with Waveform AI
EnsoData increases sleep lab capacity and efficiency with their FDA-approved sleep study analysis platform, EnsoSleep. Using waveform Artificial Intelligence (AI), EnsoSleep automates the scoring and analysis of polysomnography (PSG) and home sleep testing, freeing clinician time to focus on patients. Further, EnsoSleep analyzes sleep test waveform data to provide accurate sleep staging and event detection for clinician review. The technology integrates with the sleep labs’ existing software and diagnostic devices, automatically analyzes and scores sleep studies, and requires no change to existing clinical workflows. EnsoSleep is currently available in over 500 sleep centers in the U.S. and analyzes over 30,000 sleep studies per month. Inspire’s minority investment in EnsoData is $10 million.
Ognomy was built by sleep physicians to increase access to sleep apnea care by shifting diagnosis and treatment from the clinic to patients’ homes. The Ognomy app provides the interface between the patient and a sleep physician, while the Ognomy web portal allows clinicians to see and manage patients from any location. Following a digital consultation, the physician can order a home sleep study to be sent directly to the patient. Typically, the patient can receive a completed sleep evaluation and clinician follow-up in just a few days. Inspire provided seed funding to Ognomy to further develop their platform and to initiate a pilot program intended to support its integration with the Inspire Advisor Care Program starting in May of 2022.
“These partnerships emphasize our focus on developing a digital platform to help patients navigate their journey to an effective solution for their OSA, such as Inspire therapy,” stated Tim Herbert, Inspire Medical Systems President & CEO. “As we expand our Advisor Care Program, we understand that long sleep study wait times are a challenge for many patients. We need innovative solutions to help patients quickly, conveniently, and accurately assess the severity of their OSA and subsequently connect appropriate patients with a qualified healthcare provider to consider treatment options, including Inspire therapy. These investments will allow EnsoData and Ognomy to more rapidly grow their respective businesses, which will benefit Inspire’s ability to more broadly leverage their technologies.”
