Transforming Clinical Data Understanding with Layer Health

We're thrilled to announce our lead investment in Layer Health's $21 million Series A round. Founded by veteran AI and clinical leaders from MIT, Harvard Medical School, Microsoft, and Google, Layer Health is building a foundational AI platform that transforms how healthcare organizations extract and understand clinical information from medical records.‍

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The Challenge: Clinical Inference at Scale

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Every day, healthcare organizations face a critical challenge: extracting meaningful insights from vast amounts of clinical data trapped in medical records. For example, hospitals produce 50 million gigabytes of data every year and 97% of it goes unused. To make this data useful today, known as clinical inferencing, teams of skilled clinicians spend thousands of hours manually reviewing charts. The process is not only expensive and time-consuming but also prone to human error and inconsistency.

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For perspective, even a small health system might employ 30 or more full-time clinicians dedicated solely to chart review for clinical registries, only one of many use cases for clinical inferencing. This inefficiency impacts everything from revenue cycle management to quality reporting to patient care optimization.

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‍Layer Health's Solution: AI-Powered Clinical Understanding

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Under the leadership of CEO David Sontag, a professor of computer science and AI at MIT whose pioneering research in AI and healthcare has garnered over 20,000 citations across 140 publications, Layer Health has developed an advanced AI platform that leverages large language models (LLMs) trained on longitudinal patient data. Their technology can review and interpret both structured and unstructured patient data with clinician-level accuracy.

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Unlike traditional software solutions that rely on predefined rules, Layer Health's AI platform drives clinical insights across a patient’s entire chart, handling extremely nuanced and complex scenarios. This foundational capability enables non-technical users to extract reliable clinical insights from medical records, supporting a wide range of critical healthcare functions.

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Layer’s AI platform is already deployed and validated with multiple healthcare ecosystem partners, reducing costs and creating net-new value across many clinical use cases including:

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• Reducing quality data abstraction time by more than 65% at Froedtert & Medical College of Wisconsin, allowing staff to redirect their efforts towards higher-value tasks, enhancing both operational productivity and care delivery.  

• In collaboration with a leading nonprofit, completing real-world data extraction with exceptional accuracy for dozens of new patients in hours  — a process that previously took many months.

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The technical expertise of Layer Health's founding team, combined with their ambitious vision for transforming clinical data understanding, positions them to address one of healthcare's most persistent challenges. Their comprehensive AI platform for clinical inference isn't just solving one specific problem – it's creating a new foundation for how healthcare organizations interact with clinical data.‍

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Looking Ahead

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The future applications of Layer Health's technology are expansive. As healthcare continues its digital transformation, the ability to quickly and accurately extract insights from clinical data becomes increasingly crucial. Layer Health's foundational approach to solving this fundamental challenge positions them to become a key enabler of more efficient, effective healthcare delivery.

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“We are thrilled to partner with Define Ventures. Lynne and the entire Define team dream big, just like the Layer team, and we believe their deep experience building and scaling health and tech startups will be transformative for achieving our collective vision.” - David Sontag, Co-founder & CEO of Layer Health

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David and the Layer Health team bring an unparalleled combination of deep technical expertise and a bold vision for transforming how healthcare organizations interact with clinical data. We’re excited for the Layer platform to enable many large healthcare organizations across the ecosystem, and we’re thrilled to support them in this journey to redefine how healthcare organizations harness the power of AI.

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To learn more about Layer Health, visit www.layerhealth.com.