Agora Care patient onboarding speeds up

On a mission to become the world’s largest curated medical imaging database with direct link to the corresponding patients, Agora Care made significant progress in deploying its strategic plan in 2023. The startup led by Prof. Osman Ratib reports increasing validation and support from institutions and key professionals in the healthcare industry worldwide.

The future of medicine will be patient-centric with the development of personalized care and growing patient empowerment and participation. Acceleration of clinical research and more efficient managed care can only happen with easy access to large quantities of data. And not any kind of data: Real World Data (RWD) says the company. Indeed, reports suggest that RWD can reduce clinical trial costs by up to 50%.

Access to curated medical images is a critical part of this equation, particularly given that now 1 in 2 clinical trials require medical images (a 700% increase over the last decade). Today, medical image repositories remain siloed, fragmented, and accessible only with great difficulty and at prohibitive cost for all stakeholders: patients, care professionals and research groups. Agora Care provides a solution to these challenges.

During the past months, the team has been busy developing a variety of techniques to accelerate patient onboarding in its home market, Switzerland. In September 2023, the medtech presented at the eHealth Switzerland Projectathon a connector to link its medical image hosting and sharing platform with the core systems of the Electronic Patient Record (EPR). It has also undertaken several initiatives to prepare the roll-out of our platform in the US. The response to its first engagements with major institutions and key players has been very encouraging. The company says it has several key opportunities in the pipeline both in Switzerland and the US that are in advanced discussions.

Today the company continues to push forward in understanding the critical vectors of its two-fold business model of data management (SaaS) and data curation (RWD licensing). As a truly disruptive agent, there is no existing blueprint to copy and paste says Agora Care CEO and Founder. The team recognizes that it must approach this challenge with creativity and surround itself with leading experts in these fields. Another part requires identifying strategic partnership opportunities. Over the past year and a half, the team has developed a successful collaboration with Kisano, a pan-European company offering software packages which acts as a gateway for the collection and transfer of medical images between radiology centers and a variety of health care providers needing access to these images. Not only has this partnership proven extremely useful, and a real time-saver, for Agora Care, Kisano has one of the largest repositories of mammography scans in the region. This is of particular relevance to Agora Care as its plans ahead for its RWD curation and specific focus on oncology indications. To cement this collaboration, the medtech plans to acquire 100% of Kisano's capital after the closing of the upcoming round of financing.

After securing near CHF 2M funding in 2023 through the issuance of a convertible loan, the Swiss medtech now looks to complete the Seed round which is scheduled to close the commitments by the end of February and the funding by the end of Q1 2024. Prof. Osman Ratib adds: “The proceeds will enable us to continue our expansion through Switzerland, develop new partnerships to add value to our offering and accelerate distribution, as well as initiate a presence in the US with the anticipation of a full entry within the next 12 months.”

(PR – ES)