LOS ANGELES—GE HealthCare is tapping virtual care company Biofourmis to extend the reach of patient monitoring tech from hospitals into patients’ homes.
Announced at the ViVE 2024 conference on Monday, the collaboration leverages the combined expertise of the two companies to scale and deliver innovative care-at-home solutions, GE HealthCare and Biofourmis executives said.
Boston-based Biofourmis is a health tech company that offers care-at-home solutions and services to enable medical care both virtually and in person. The company, which launched in 2016, the company developed solutions for hospital-level services, virtual provider networks for remote care, in-home services as well as clinical trial support for biopharma companies.
Biofourmis offers home care tools to help remotely monitor acute and post-acute patients and a virtual specialty care platform. Its platform combines FDA-cleared AI-guided algorithms, clinical-grade wearable devices, in-home services orchestration technology and nursing services.
“Biofourmis’ demonstrated success with care-at-home solutions will extend GE HealthCare’s current inpatient monitoring portfolio to support patient care from the hospital to home,” said Ashutosh Banerjee, general manager, cardiology solutions and remote patient monitoring at GE HealthCare.
"Combining our companies’ demonstrated capabilities will help revolutionize the way we approach the patient care journey as well as help address current challenges faced by health systems including hospital capacity issues and clinical staffing shortages," Banerjee said.
The goal of the GE HealthCare-Biofourmis collaboration is to enable more patients to go home earlier, and offer an alternative to facility-based care, the companies said.
GE HealthCare also wants to tap into Biofourmis’ FDA-cleared, AI-guided algorithms to help care teams deliver personalized care at home.
Spun out from General Electric, GE HealthCare became a standalone company a year ago and develops medical technology, pharmaceutical diagnostics and digital solutions. The company provides patient care and monitoring solutions for hospitals.
The company brought in $19.6 billion during 2023, including $3.1 billion in patient care and monitoring solutions, Fierce Medtech reported.
Teaming up with Biofourmis helps GE HealthCare push into at-home virtual care services, an area that is seeing strong growth.
GE HealthCare says its FlexAcuity monitoring solutions in combination with its virtual care solutions like Mural ICU, Command Center and Digital CMU adapt to rapidly changing patient needs in the hospital. By offering Biofourmis’ virtual care-at-home solutions to customers, the company aims to extend the care continuum beyond the hospital. At the same time, care teams can have a longitudinal patient view beyond the hospital setting.
The company will begin distributing Biofourmis' solutions to customers in the U.S. this quarter.
"Our collaboration will enable health systems and hospitals to leverage the power of technology and data in order to shape patient-focused solutions across the care continuum, no matter where the site of care is." said Ross Armstrong, general manager of Biofourmis Care.
Biofourmis, a company that has raised $445 million in funding backed by SoftBank and other investors, has been building out its care delivery and life sciences solutions and expanding its health system, hospital, provider group and biopharma customers.
Last summer, it claimed it has deployed its solutions with over 65 customers, including multi-year collaborations and strategic partnerships with leading pharmaceutical companies, health systems, hospitals and risk-based organizations.
The company was valued at more than $1 billion after its $300 million series D raise in September 2022.
In July, Biofourmis laid off 120 employees worldwide, including 48 workers in the U.S. A month later, company founder Kuldeep Singh Rajput stepped down as CEO.
The company recently reeled in partnerships with four undisclosed Big Pharmas centered on developing digital biomarkers and safety monitoring algorithms in cancer trials.
Biofourmis also has inked multiyear collaborations with major health systems. Orlando Health tapped the company to support providing hospital-level care to patients in their homes and Beacon Health System is working with a health tech company on a multi-hospital post-discharge remote patient monitoring program for complex chronic conditions.
Augusta University Health is working with Biofourmis to expand its Virtual Care at Home program to improve throughput in the emergency department (ED) and inpatient setting.
Just last week, WellSpan Health, an eight-hospital integrated delivery system, unveiled a collaboration with Bioforumsi to support a major expansion and management of a bundled program that includes hospital-level and post-acute care at home. WellSpan is replacing its legacy system with Biofourmis’s remote patient management solution.