IOMED raises €10M to unlock hospital data with AI

The company is currently available across Spain, and now plans to expand to Italy and Portugal

The market for artificial intelligence in healthcare is already huge, and only getting bigger: in 2021, it was worth around $11 billion U.S. dollars worldwide, and it was forecast that the global healthcare AI market would be worth almost $188 billion U.S. dollars by 2030, increasing at a compound annual growth rate of 37 percent from 2022 to 2030.

The use cases for AI in the space are immeasurable, but one of the most important is unlocking the vast amount of data flowing into the space and making it actionable, which is what IOMED does: the company develops AI-powered technology for healthcare data activation, unlocking data from hospitals' data sources.

This week the company announced a €10M  Series A investment round led by Philips Ventures and XTX Ventures, along with participation from Fondo Bolsa Social and Redseed, as well as IOMED’s existing investors Adara Ventures and EASO Ventures. In addition, IOMED has also received a grant of nearly €1 million from red.es to support a research and development project in artificial intelligence, bringing its total raised €12.4 million total to date.

IOMED was founded in 2016, stemming from the identification of a critical need to enhance effectiveness in clinical research.

"Gabriel de Maeztu, medical doctor and co-founder of the company, faced the daunting task of manually collecting data for a clinical research project in a hospital. The labor-intensive and time-consuming process convinced him of the need for a profound change in healthcare data management," Javier de Oca, co-founder, and CEO of IOMED, told VatorNews. 

Alongside de Oca and Álvaro Abella, he embarked on developing a technology-based solution for structuring and activating medical data. This project materialized into IOMED, which was officially launched a year later, initially deploying in hospitals in the Barcelona region.

IOMED activates data from both structured and unstructured sources, as human-written records, thanks to its Natural Language Processing System. This data is transformed into OMOP Common Data Model, and stored in-house hospitals' systems, allowing for a better understanding of healthcare information. Hospital centers are able to collaborate with institutions, researchers, medical professionals, and the industry in general, providing them with updated and real-world data.

"IOMED adds value to the healthcare sector through AI and Natural Language Processing technology. The primary differentiating factor of our technology lies in the use of Artificial Intelligence and NLP technology," de Oca said.

"This enables us to structure crucial information from electronic health records, including free-text from clinical records, and standardize this information into OMOP Common Data Model, ensuring protection and security through our Federated Data Model."

The company currently has over 50 customers, including hospitals, medical institutions, regulatory organizations, the pharmaceutical and biotechnology industry, healthcare technology companies, as well as researchers and academics. 

"IOMED also stands out in the healthcare technology industry for being a part of the OHDSI network and actively working to structure all medical data into OMOP CDM, allowing us to closely collaborate with this community and contribute to significant advancements in healthcare research. IOMED has processed data from 21 million medical records to OMOP CDM," said de Oca.

The platform is currently available in hospitals across Spain, and now that it has this new funding the plan is to drive the company's international expansion into Portugal and Italy.

"Our main goal now is to explore new possibilities together with hospitals to harness the potential of its data," de Oca said.

"Our ultimate goal is to lay the foundation for data-driven medicine and ensure that medical practice is based on evidence and real-world data. Our aspiration is to become catalysts for change and achieve more personalized and effective healthcare, with the patient at the center. Therefore, we are working tirelessly to make medical information more accessible and valuable to the community."