How Brazilian ‘Laura’ startup reduces hospitalizations and mortality – and received US$1.9 million

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – The coronavirus pandemic has put the spotlight on the need to better manage hospital resources – such as nurses, intensive care physicians, specialist doctors, intensive care units (ICU). But some healthcare startups have been eyeing healthcare bottlenecks for years.

One of them is Laura. The healthtech serves over 40 healthcare institutions through artificial intelligence. The collection and processing of data allows it to help hospitals, municipal secretariats, and health operators decide which patients should have priority care and whether their follow-up will be in-person or online.

This proposal attracted Laura’s first external funding. The health startup announced a R$10 (US$1.9) million seed investment, which will be used for national and international expansion.

Laura’s founders talked about the business model, the next steps after the investment and the scenario of healthtechs in Brazil.

Artificial intelligence for health

Laura was founded by Christian Rocha, Hugo Morales and Jacson Fressatto. Fressato has a background in technology and security. His relationship with the health area was born from a personal experience, in 2010. Fressatto’s daughter passed away in an ICU. “I took home the discomfort of whether enough had been done. What victimized her were late procedures and sepsis [generalized infection]. These are not problems exclusive to public hospitals,” he says.

The World Health Organization (WHO) states that sepsis is accountable for 1 in every 5 deaths in the world. There are 11 million deaths annually, 85% of which occur in low-resource settings. Twenty-seven percent of people with sepsis in hospitals, and 42% of people specifically with sepsis in ICUs, will lose their lives.

Fressatto began studying how to improve this picture through artificial intelligence. Between 2012 and 2015, he used his own resources to test, homologate, and place prototypes in hospitals. Tests effectively began in 2016, after a R$150,000 angel investment.

Fressatto met Christian Rocha at that time. The computer scientist has a master’s degree focused on artificial intelligence in health from the University of Strasbourg (France). “I wanted to be part of impactful projects, and that’s when I met Jacson,” he says.

Hugo Morales joined the founding team to provide the physicians’ insight. The infectologist worked in patient management and saw a constant waste of time and misinformation in medical records. “This is a systemic problem, so you also need a systemic solution. I met Jacson and Christian at a symposium and became interested in the idea of completely changing the standard of care,” says Morales.

“Platforms that provide analysis based on artificial intelligence abound and will become a commodity. Our differential lies in taking it to the operational level, using methodologies such as design thinking to place this technology in the hands of health professionals,” argues Fressatto.

Laura serves over 40 hospitals, municipal secretariats, and health operators through 10.7 million consultations in its 4 years of operation. The goal is to identify higher-risk patients in advance. “In hospitals, patients can die within hours if their condition worsens and nothing is done. Outside hospitals, patients with symptoms and no follow-up can end up hospitalized,” says Rocha.

Laura uses artificial intelligence to track data and determine which patients to focus on in hospitals. Outside hospitals, users can talk to Laura’s care robot through the startup’s app or WhatsApp. The startup conducts a screening and determines if the patient needs to go to the emergency room, have a telemedicine consultation, or simply be monitored by the robot.

The startup connects with electronic medical records and patient interactions with the robot to collect data and fine-tune its health decision support system. “All this interface is provided to doctors and nurses to guide the team’s next step, automating patient care management,” says Rocha. “Technology is not coming to replace, but rather to assist the decision. The decision will always be the doctor’s,” Fressatto stresses.

Laura is a software as a service (SaaS), charging a monthly fee that varies according to the number of lives monitored.

According to a study conducted by Laura with 54,000 patients, the hospitalization rate dropped 10% and the mortality rate fell 25%. The startup will present these results in October this year at SAIL, a symposium on artificial intelligence for health systems conducted by universities such as Johns Hopkins and Harvard.

“In addition to increased patient access, quality, and safety, we also have a cost benefit. Operators see lower claims,” says Morales. Laura has a team of 6 professionals dedicated to preparing scientific publications, including epidemiologists, biomedical scientists, and computer and machine learning engineers.

New investment, new goals

The R$10 million seed investment was led by the American fund GAA Investments, which has previously invested in Brazilian startups such as Alana and Digibee. “We had achieved a balance between revenues and expenses, but we sought the investment to accelerate our growth. The fund has extensive knowledge in scaling early-stage startups, helping with traction and internationalization. We solved a global problem, so we intend to project globally in the next 5 years”, says Rocha.

The first pilot of international expansion should occur in 2021. Laura is negotiating the introduction of its technology in two hospitals in Lima (Peru). “As we validate clinical and economic benefits, we will be able to expand to the rest of Latin America,” says Morales.

However, the focus this year is still on taking Laura to the rest of Brazil. The startup seeks to massify its adoption in the Southeast and expand to the North and Northeast. The startup plans to expand from 65 to 80 employees by the end of the year.

In financial terms, the plan is to reach over 80 institutions served and triple the revenues (an increase of 200%). In 2020, the increase reached 250%.

The future of health (and healthtechs)

According to Rocha, hospitals have gradually accepted the use of technology in their operations. “There is a lag in technology adoption in hospitals – sectors like banking and manufacturing are more digitized. Between 2016 and 2018, we introduced the startup to hospitals and they thought we were going to replace doctors, that our proposal wasn’t going to help.”

The situation improved from 2019, according to the cofounders. “It was a fee-for-service model. We would hear about not decreasing length of stay or antibiotic consumption because that generated revenue for the hospital, and the operators can’t handle it. We saw a change to provide value to the patient, because the previous model was unsustainable,” Morales says. “The more you invest in quality of life, before or after an operation, the better the use of resources and the results.”

The switch from the fee-for-service model to a compensation model for better care and prevention of more severe problems is advocated by other Brazilian healthtechs, such as Sami, a health plan company for entrepreneurs.

The health segment is the 3rd in the country in number of startups. There are 542 healthtechs in Brazil, according to data from Distrito innovation company. But Brazilian health startups still have a long way to go in the country, according to Rocha.

“Investment in healthcare set a global record in 2020. More and more, health will be looked at as an opportunity for improvement,” he says. Venture capital investment in healthtechs broke a record and reached US$14 billion in 2020, up from US$10 billion in 2019, according to Deloitte consulting. “However, none of the 200 most valuable healthtechs in the world are located in Latin America. We want to change that statistic.”

Source: infomoney

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