Investment Notes: Evidentli

“Evidence” is the insights extracted from a rich data source that inform evidence-based decisions. In the healthcare world, “evidence” makes the world go around. Extracting it from large amounts of data, however, has been a costly and wildly inefficient endeavour until now.

Evidentli, founded by Dr. Guy Tsafnat, Prof. Enrico Coiera, Alison Gartner, and Greg Miner, is leveraging artificial intelligence and machine learning to extrapolate evidence in record time. One trial with a medical facility saw the software surface insights in two days that would traditionally take longer than a year to extrapolate. This one deployment saved the facility over $1m.

We couldn’t be more excited to welcome Evidentli into our Early Stage Fund 2 portfolio, having participated last year in their Seed round alongside Healthcare Ventures, BlackNova VC, Medical Angels, notable HNW investors, and our syndicate, Club Investible.

Decades in the making

The journey to converting healthcare data into “evidence” began with Dr. Guy Tsafnat and Prof. Enrico Coiera’s research in the early 2000s. Being true visionaries, they were exploring the concept of open standards, the guidelines required to keep software open source, before it had a name. After developing the Piano platform with the Centre for Health Informatics at Macquarie University, they decided to take their tech to the broader market in 2019.

The catalyst for their research was the disorganisation of healthcare data. 80% of data in the healthcare system exists in unstructured formats and is fragmented across multiple incompatible data sources and systems. This makes it extremely challenging to link data within a single healthcare provider, let alone across different providers, rendering the data unusable for evidence-based analyse at scale.  

The inability to link data is a massive problem that has led to years of misdiagnosis and redundant treatments, as well as admin inefficiencies and wasted healthcare spending.

Transforming healthcare data, at scale

Evidentli’s Piano platform solves this underlying healthcare data issue by transforming disorganised, inconsistent, and unreliable data into standardised, relevant, and transparent evidence to improve patient outcomes in the most efficient way.

The tedious task of converting healthcare data is often done manually by highly trained individuals at a significant cost. Piano streamlines the work of human operators and reduces human error by encapsulating the entire workflow into a single no-code research platform. This platform adds a tremendous amount of value to the healthcare system and has application potential for global use.

Piano uses artificial intelligence and machine learning to collect data from multiple databases and clean it into the most used standard for research on patient data – the Observational Medical Outcomes Partnership (OMOP) Common Data Model (CDM). The OMOP CDM is a complex model for translating information into insights. With a systematic analysis, this model converts disparate data points into a common format that can then be interpreted by a practitioner.

After the Piano platform performs this analysis, it runs a second scan using a library of standard analytic routines. Evidentli has already deployed this technology with partners like the Macquarie University Hospital, the Northern Territory Government and Queensland Health, proving their ability to turn unanswered years’ worth of research into an evidence-based solution within a fraction of the time and at a 99% precision accuracy.

Founded and built by the best minds in digital health

Beyond the platform itself, what impressed us was the stellar team behind the tech.  

Dr Guy Tsafnat, the principal inventor of Piano and the CTO of Evidentli, is globally recognised for his pioneering research on using AI to automate clinical evidence production.

Enrico Coiera is regarded as one of the world’s most knowledgeable and influential minds in digital health and is one of the 10 most cited academics in digital health. He is the author of “Guide to Health Informatics”, the definitive text used throughout postgraduate programs in health informatics all over the world.  

Greg Miner, the CEO is a seasoned software executive having spent over 20 years developing and launching market-leading technologies in Microsoft and Apple.  

Finally, Alison Gartner, the CFO, has spent close to two decades investing in healthcare through her portfolio management roles at Asia Union Investments (the family office of Chris Abbott AM) and Bioscience Managers (a Melbourne based Life Science Fund).

This team has an enormous task ahead of them but their unrivalled understanding of the problem, their combined expertise, and the accuracy of their technology positions them as market leaders who are powering a real change.