Healthtech business Patientmpower targeting €4 million fundraise

Founded by: Eamonn Costello, Kerrill Thornhill and Colin Edwards in 2015

Staff: 20

Funding: €4 million

Patientmpower, a Dublin-based healthtech business, plans to raise €4 million in funding next year following its expansion into the Benelux market.

The business was founded by Eamonn Costello, Kerrill Thornhill and Colin Edwards in 2015 and has 20 staff. To date, it has raised €4 million in funding and has clients in Ireland, Canada, Germany, the US and Britain.

Patientmpower enables patients to do routine appointments at home without needing to go to hospital. The system connects to a range of medical devices that processes information for physicians, and alerts the clinical if a hospital visit is required.

“Take a cystic fibrosis patient. There’s an app that connects to devices they use and it sends the user reminders to do the appropriate measurements at home. Then it gives them surveys that are clinically significant,” Costello said,

“We use an AI algorithm in controlling the data, assessing if the tests are done correctly because the data is really important.”

Costello said that there were benefits on all sides of the patient-physician relationship due to the time saved for both as well as reduced stress.

“One of our biggest customers is NYU Langone, which is based in the US but has customers all over America. It enables them to be more efficient at seeing patients and frees up the patients from having to go to the hospital routinely just to be told they are ok,” he said.

Costello is modest when it comes to the origins of Patientmpower.

“Some start-ups have a Eureka moment, ours didn’t. It’s just an evolution. What we are doing now is very different to what we thought we were going to do in 2015. We thought we were going to build something around medication reminders. There’s an element of that, but it’s not the core of what we do,” he said.

“What we do now has really just been informed by spending the last eight years talking to lots of doctors, nurses and patients. It’s not like we just ran with a great idea. We spoke with the people that we’d be working with.”

The business sells to healthcare systems including the HSE and NHS as well as US hospitals. It also targets large research projects, including with the University of Giessen in Germany.

“We’re trying to break into the pharma and medtech sector. It’s a lesser part of our business right now but we are looking to grow there as a route to market. The pandemic saw significant growth for what we do as there’s more acceptance of digital care at home now,” Costello said.

The business has been supported by Enterprise Ireland, and Costello said the agency had provided significant assistance with its international expansion.

“They’ve been great on a number of levels. The primary area is the local market offices helping with the US, Britain and Germany. We’re regularly in touch with people on the ground there and they help us get links into people and open doors,” he said.

“We just started our first deployment in Canada and the introduction there began with the Enterprise Ireland office there.”

This Making it Work article is produced in partnership with Enterprise Ireland