Medisafe raises $30 million for predictive AI that reminds people to take their pills

Medisafe, a startup developing a personalized medication management platform to help patients stay on top of their prescriptions, today announced it has raised $30 million. The company says this new investment will enable it to expand its solutions while accelerating revenue.

According to a review in the Annals of Internal Medicine, 20% to 30% of medication prescriptions are never filled, and approximately 50% of medications for chronic disease aren’t taken as prescribed. This lack of adherence is estimated to cause approximately 125,000 deaths and to cost the U.S. health care system between $100 billion and $289 billion per year.

In 2012, Medisafe cofounders Omri Shor and Rotem Shor faced a family health emergency. Due to a miscommunication about his medication schedule, their father accidentally took an extra dose of insulin for his diabetes. In an effort to address this kind of mistake and prevent it from happening in the future, the brothers created Medisafe, which helps manage prescription schedules by leveraging AI and big data.

Medisafe employs what it calls “digital drug companions” to ensure medication takers follow through with their prescriptions. After a patient enters a medication into Medisafe’s smartphone app, the app guides them through a process that entails collecting release forms and helping them through titration schedules. Powered by Medisafe’s predictive AI engine — Just-in-time-Interventions (JITI) — the app’s content changes as the patient matriculates through therapy and recovery, delivering instructions on how to administer medication, assessing eligibility for financial support programs, and ordering refills, as well as collecting information for providers via surveys.

Medisafe can email and text patients to remind them to take their medications on time. Moreover, the platform can target “rising-risk” patients with analytics and insights based on real-time behavioral assessments, boosting adherence up to 20%.

“With AI integration, users’ friends and physicians can be alerted if a user has missed doses, when specific steps have not been completed, or when a patient has some kind of challenging event throughout their journey,” a spokesperson told VentureBeat via email. “Through [Medisafe’s] platform, the company delivers average adherence rates by users of 86%, well above industry norms of 50%. Billions of successful medication doses are managed through Medisafe’s platform, preventing more than 500,000 potentially harmful drug-to-drug interactions.”

On the backend, Medisafe’s in-app Care Connector enables clinicians to remotely connect with patients if they need additional assistance. And the company’s Maestro product provides a summary of patient census, compliance configuration settings, access to program reporting, and integrations with other vendor data.

While Medisafe directly competes with Walmart’s CareZone, Shop Apotheke’s MyTherapy, TrialCard’s Mango, and Healthprize, it claims to be among the largest medication management platforms in the world, with over 7 million registered users. Over the past eight years, through partnerships with pharma companies including Merck, Medisafe has amassed a database of over 4 billion dosage behaviors informing JITI.

“Today’s investment allows Medisafe to expand holistic treatment support for patients to impact behavior change and ultimately outcomes. Medisafe is continuously advancing its technology to meet the dynamic needs of patients managing complex therapies,” Omri Shor said in a press release.

Sanofi Ventures and Alive Israel HealthTech Fund led Medisafe’s series C funding announced today, with participation from Leumi Partners, Menorah Mivtachim, and Consensus Business Group, as well as previous backers Pitango Ventures, 7Wire Ventures, Merck Ventures, Octopus Ventures, Lool HealthTech, Triventures, and OurCrowd. It brings Medisafe’s total raised to date to roughly $55 million. The company has headquarters in Israel and Boston, Massachusetts.