9.1.2020
Announcing Our Investment in PicnicHealth

By Sunil Dhaliwal

Chronic illnesses affect 60% of Americans and cost $3.5 trillion annually to manage – an incredible burden on both patients and our healthcare system. While researchers are working hard to advance treatments for many serious conditions, they are doing so with one arm tied behind their back. The problem? They lack the high-quality data that allows them to deeply understand the real-world experiences of the massive number of patients they aim to help.

A solution to this data problem lies in the emerging field of Real World Evidence. We believe RWE is the best path to improve patient outcomes, reduce costs, and improve velocity for those innovating on new treatments. Unfortunately, legacy approaches to RWE have saddled researchers with outdated solutions centered around superficial data from health insurers or incomplete data from healthcare providers. What they need is a modern approach, a patient-centric approach, that gives them the depth and completeness of data they deserve.

Today, we are excited to announce our most recent investment in PicnicHealth, a company reshaping the RWE landscape by giving chronically ill patients unprecedented access to their medical information while providing researchers with data of unmatched depth and quality. Since its founding four years ago, PicnicHealth has developed the industry’s most powerful and flexible medical AI capable of transforming vast amounts of real-word medical data into meaningful health information for the benefit of thousands of patients and some of the world’s leading academic and commercial researchers.

After evaluating many competing approaches to RWE, we committed to lead PicnicHealth’s Series A financing in 2018 because their patient-focused mission and deep commitment to patient privacy and control was, simply, the right approach. We were equally impressed by their technology platform, which is equal parts robust and innovative. Picnic had spent years solving the artificial intelligence, data pipelining and automation challenges necessary to extract meaning and context from complicated medical information across electronic health records, clinical notes, test results, and medical imagery. Their ability to continually collect, organize, and understand medical information of significant scale and variety was unlike anything in the market.  Moreover, Picnic’s ability to transform that information into anonymized data of sufficient quality to satisfy the demands of both regulators and researchers was also a capability unmatched in the industry.

Beyond their product vision and technical depth, it was the strength of the founders that gave us the most confidence to join the Picnic team. Amplify believes deeply in founders whose first-hand experience with a problem compels them to obsess over delivering the perfect solution to their customers. In this case, it was Noga Leviner’s struggle with managing her own chronic condition with insufficient and fragmented data that gave us even more confidence in Picnic’s vision of the ideal platform for RWE.

Now with years of quiet progress and superior results behind them, we are thrilled to announce our ongoing investment in support of Picnic’s Series B financing. Please join us in extending our congratulations to the entire PicnicHealth team on this milestone. We are incredibly excited for their next phase of growth and can’t wait to see their solution change the nature of care and innovation for many chronic diseases.

Source: Centers for Disease Control –  https://www.cdc.gov/chronicdisease/resources/infographic/chronic-diseases.htm

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