Diabetes management specialist Glooko announced that it has raised $16.5 million in Series B financing, which will be used to expand the company's FDA-cleared, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)-compliant platform to include device data from insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring systems as well as integration of personalized predictive algorithms.
The company's Web and mobile application is designed to improve health outcomes for people with diabetes, and the platform syncs with more 30 blood glucose meters as well as a number of major fitness and activity trackers, and supplies verified patient data such as blood glucose, carbs, insulin, blood pressure, diet and weight data.
Using Glooko's Bluetooth-enabled MeterSync device, patients are already able to sync data from blood glucose monitors with their Apple or Android mobile device.
Glooko's mobile app enables patients to track and manage aspects of their diabetes care, while the population management Web app and application programming interfaces (APIs) offer diabetes-centric analytics and supply reports, graphs and risk flags to health systems and payers.
"With the confluence and broad adoption of mobile and cloud technology, new government health care policy focused on value and outcomes, and the economics of health care moving toward incentives for keeping patients out of the hospital, both patients and their care providers are more able and incentivized to adopt technology to improve," Rick Altinger, CEO of Glooko, told eWEEK.
Altinger said IT organizations that support health systems are working to keep up with this change by deploying new solutions like Glooko into their ecosystem.
"For them, it's finding the providers that are HIPAA compliant and can safely manage patient data," he said.
The platform also allows patients to record food intake and insulin dosage to provide context around changes in their blood glucose readings.
Altinger said in the near term, Glooko will be adding data from insulin pumps and continuous glucose monitoring systems and also integrating personalized predictive algorithms into its platform.
"Glooko will bring more utility to patients who require intensive, day-to-day glucose management, and will continue to make it easier for health care providers to get a full picture of a patient's health so they can proactively treat them," he said. "As for hiring, we'll grow our product development team and hire customer success managers to ensure we're able to meet the high demand for Glooko we're seeing from health systems and patients."
Canaan Partners and Medtronic joined existing investors including The Social + Capital Partnership and Samsung in the financing, and as part of this round, Canaan Partners' Wende Hutton has joined the Glooko board of directors.
Glooko has already partnered with other organizations specializing in diabetes care, including the Joslin Diabetes Center, and U.S. care providers such as the Diabetes & Glandular Disease Clinic (DGD) and Atrius Health.
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