Culver City-based healthcare company NantHealth announced a $100 million dollar investment this week to ramp up the R&D efforts behind its cloud-based clinical operating system which is agnostic to any device or electronic health record.
This week’s investment comes from Kuwait Investment Authority, a sovereign wealth fund that came on board shortly after an undisclosed deal was announced in April in which BlackBerry bought a minority stake in NantHealth. BlackBerry and NantHealth are now reportedly working to launch a new smartphone specifically for the healthcare industry in late 2014 or early 2015.
Currently, the integrated NantHealth platform is installed at approximately 260 hospitals and connects more than 16,000 medical devices collecting more than 3 billion vital signs annually.
That’s a lot of powerful data (what NantHealth calls "actionable health information") available for doctors and caretakers, data that will help provide modern healthcare at a lower cost. NantHealth’s integrated platform, a first for today’s healthcare system, is used by all parties: doctors, researchers, patients and payers.
“This is the future of healthcare, a field where the ability to share reliable information and make sense of conflicting signals can mean the difference between life and death,” BlackBerry CEO John Chen wrote in a CNBC column. “As the healthcare industry changes, a secure and robust technology infrastructure becomes all the more vital — not only to keep doctors and nurses current on patient care, but also to ensure compliance with privacy laws and streamline sometimes cumbersome and confusing billing procedures.”
NantHealth now plans to use its leverage with Kuwait Investment Authority to give the company the global scale it is looking for to provide quality care to those in need.
"Delivery of 21st century, genomically informed care must be shared with the world,” founder and CEO Patrick Soon-Shiong said in a statement. ”NantHealth enables the rapid sharing of breakthrough medicines and information with the rest of the developed and developing world...a Global Healthcare Cooperative, in which global communities rally together around a common cause of better health.”
