In the recent past, waiting times in hospitals and emergency admissions have become extremely costly, post COVID-19 pandemic. Simultaneously, the workload of doctors and medical professionals has increased manifolds.
This has created a demand for in-home health monitoring services also known as remote patient monitoring (RPM) for continuous monitoring solutions outside of the clinical setting.
According to the report by MarketsandMarkets, the global RPM market surged in value during 2020, reaching $23.2B and is expected to grow five times larger by 2025.
However, the biggest challenge for most home health monitoring devices is poor patient compliance. Meet Casana, a spin-off from the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) in partnership with the University of Rochester Medical Center (URMC).
The company’s Heart Seat aims to help mitigate this problem and provides effortless daily monitoring and reporting of multiple health parameters for patients.
Raised $30M
As a result, Casana raised $30M funding in Series B funding led by Morningside. Other investors, including Matrix Partners as well as Series A investors General Catalyst and Outsiders Fund, participated. The latest round brings the total funding to $46M.
Casana CEO Austin McChord said, “In a world overrun with push notifications, nudges, and reminders, our product needs none of that. The Heart Seat is different from virtually every other vitals monitoring product, in that it takes no time out of your day and works best when you forget it’s even there.”
Fund utilisation
The funding will enable Casana to accelerate the development and commercialisation of its first product – The Heart Seat. At present, the company is currently pursuing FDA clearance for The Heart Seat (In-home cardiovascular monitoring toilet seat).
Further, the company is also investing in several studies to investigate the potential value of The Heart Seat for health systems and risk-bearing organisations.
According to the company, the Heart Seat’s first commercial offering is a cuffless blood pressure monitor built into the toilet seat to help people manage and control high blood pressure.
Why was Casana founded?
Founded in 2018 by Dr. Nicholas Conn, Casana is a healthcare technology company that aims to assist medical teams in their care management of patients with chronic conditions beyond hospital settings.
Dr. Nicholas Conn, who wants to use passive, connected sensors to solve the challenges of managing health at home, developed The Heart Seat during his Ph.D. work at the Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT).
The Heart Seat
The Heart Seat is an IoT health monitoring toilet seat that captures clinically relevant information, including heart rate, blood pressure, and blood oxygenation.
It is designed to enable patients to receive monitoring at home without the need for behavior changes.
The Heart Seat unobtrusively gathers health data and analyses it in context, to provide unique insights into health and trends over time.
“As healthcare moves from the doctor’s office into the home, convenient home monitoring is becoming increasingly important for patient care. Casana’s Heart Seat holds the unique promise of reliably and conveniently measuring multiple health parameters including Blood Pressure, Heart Rate, and Oxygen Saturation, all in the privacy of the patient’s home,” said Dr. Jeffrey M Leiden, Chairman of the Board of Casana, and former CEO and Chairman of Vertex Pharmaceuticals.
Investor
Founded in 1986 by the Chan family in Shanghai, Morningside invests in private equity and venture capital opportunities.
“Casana’s Heart Seat has the potential to fundamentally change the way cardiovascular disease is monitored, by changing the venue of care from the clinic to the home and providing insights to the clinician,” said Gerald Chan, Co-founder of Morningside. “We invest in bold ideas backed by solid science, and are proud to partner with Casana in this endeavor.”
