It’s a milestone moment for the five-year-old wound care startup founded out of Johns Hopkins’ CBID. Now it will help grow predictive analytics to a Pittsburgh-based company with a leading role in health records software.
This content is reprinted from a Technical.ly digital magazine article written by Stephen Babcock and published on May 18, 2020. Read the full article here.
Tissue Analytics, a Baltimore startup bringing tech tools to wound care and applying predictive analytics, was acquired by Pittsburgh-based Net Health, which provides cloud-based electronic health record software.
Matching product acumen with scale, the acquisition will help Net Health expand its wound care offerings into more settings and advance the use of predictive analytics across its products, Net Health CEO Josh Pickus said.
All 30 members of Tissue Analytics’ team will join Net Health, and the company’s Inner Harbor and Kansas City offices will remain. In Net Health, it joins a company that already had six offices and whose software is used in 14,000 facilities. Tissue Analytics CEO Kevin Keenahan said it’s a leader in outpatient care settings.
“In Net Health, we saw the strongest possible partner to realize our goal of a fully connected wound care continuum,” Keenahan said, adding that he considers the company lucky to have found a partner so well-suited for expansion in the market given its roots in the clinic.
Founded in 2014 by Keenahan and CTO Josh Budman, the company set out to improve care for patients with chronic wounds like venous or diabetic ulcers, burns and surgical wounds. While in grad school at Johns Hopkins’ Center for Bioengineering Innovation and Design (CBID), they saw rounded edges of wounds being measured with straight rulers, and found that the field involved lots of guesswork.
Seeing a chance to get more certainty through technology, Tissue Analytics grew with a focus on building a product with imaging (including 3D) and measurement that would automate tracking. It also recently launched a remote monitoring app that would bring those tools to smartphones.
The “user-friendly, mobile capability” was among the product offerings that will expand Net Health’s offerings. “This is a very substantial upgrade,” Pickus said. Net Health also has a big presence in outpatient care settings, and Tissue Analytics brings a presence in inpatient and acute care settings, as well as clinical trials and product manufacturing. The company will keep the Tissue Analytics brand, but will integrate the technology under Net Health offerings, as well.
Tissue Analytics has put just as much of a priority on ensuring that technology could be interoperable with the electronic medical records systems used by clinicians that would allow it to be deployed. Pickus said the work that Tissue Analytics has already done to integrate with electronic medical records systems like Cerner, Epic, athenahealth and Allscripts was also appealing.
“Those are hard to get right and they matter a lot,” Pickus said.
Third, Tissue Analytics has a portal for clinicians that applies machine learning and analytics to help with decision making. The acquisition will help Net Health prepare for electronic health records of the future, in which analytics and other techniques could be applied to the data collected to make recommendations for patients that could potentially help improve care or reduce costs.
Net Health sees predictive analytics “as a really important piece of our future, not just for wound care, but across the product line, so this was an opportunity to accelerate our sophistication in that area,” Pickus said.