It’s been a little more than a year since France-based Nabla raised €17M in funding to build an app-based virtual clinic entirely dedicated to women’s health. Last week in an interview with TechCrunch its co-founder now shared a new direction for the company. Nabla is no longer going after the B2C use case, but is now focused on patient engagement and retention having built out a new AI-support chat app that clinicians can use to stay in touch with patients.
What’s the new service all about?
According to Techcrunch “Nabla’s messaging and teleconsultation communication modules sit as a layer atop the customer healthcare service, ingesting and structuring patient data — with its machine learning software supporting clinicians with real-time prompts and visualizations, as well as offering ongoing patient outreach features to extend service provision.
The startup argues its approach can improve medical outcomes by supporting healthcare professionals to be able to ask relevant questions during a consultation, based on the AI’s ability to aggregate patient activity and surface contextually relevant data — and afterwards, with features like automated transcription and by suggesting updates a clinician could make to a patient’s medical file.”
According to a blog post a number of digital health companies have already implemented Nabla’s B2B solution. Among them are women’s health startups Aura Fertility, Omena, Jeen, Freya, and Umaya, Resilience, a leader in digital oncology as well as, “several remote patient monitoring and remote diagnostic clinics in the US (Cardiologs/Philips), and a virtual primary care provider in 9 African countries (Tchak).”
Nabla’s women’s health app, which has served 25,000 women according to the company, remains operational for now although it is no longer a focus for the company.
On the record
Co-founder and CEO Alexandre Lebrun shares with TechCrunch: “Our long term goal is to use this data not just for the benefit of one patient but learn and aggregate all this data and, for instance, try to predict what will happen next with the patient or to do faster diagnostics. Of course the data we have is super valuable for research because we have very, very detailed information about the patient and not just the typical hospital records… [We have data on] what they eat, how they live, their social environment, family environment — we know it’s very important for health but this information is nowhere to be found in existing medical records. But we have part of it. And so this is incredibly valuable for future academic research — and when we ask our users would you agree to share this data for medical research… most say yes of course, if they understand the scope of what we share.”
