The Patient Company Secures $1 Million in Seed Round bridging innovation and collaboration on its way to early pilot
POSTED: Monday, March 15, 2021
CATEGORY: Red Cedar Ventures
Grand Rapids, MI (ENTER PR SOURCE - Mar 1, 2021) – The Patient Company, a healthcare innovations management and product development Company, originally launched in collaboration with Spectrum Health, announced today its capital raise of $1 million in an oversubscribed seed round.
The idea for the SimPull device was developed internally at Spectrum Health from the input of patient transport and employee safety specialists including team lead, Andrew Heuerman.
“The SimPull device began with a two-year collaboration with faculty and students from Grand Valley State University’s (GVSU) College of Engineering and Computing. In the spirit of innovation, Spectrum teams did not spare our feelings when they evaluated our prototypes, but their objective input energized the students and led to better designs. SimPull was then created,” remarked Dr. Farris of GVSU.
The capital will support the company’s growth around pilot study readiness for research and investigational activities. This helps save time compared to current clinical workflows while directly addressing injury prevention to clinical care teams during lateral patient transfers protocols.
“Nurses experience more injuries than any profession in any industry. Injury reduction must be prioritized. Transferring patients is the second highest cause of healthcare employee injuries in the U.S. and the largest contributor is lateral transfer,” said Andrew Heuerman, The Patient Company’s CEO and Co-Founder. “Lateral patient transfer (lateral transfer) is the act of moving a patient from one horizontal surface to another. Lateral transfer is needed for many reasons, including but not limited to, moving patients into hospitals from a gurney to hospital stretcher, changing units within hospitals, and going for imaging, surgery, or testing.”
The patient handling equipment market is expected to reach a value size of $17.18 billion by 2021 at a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%. A major factor driving growth is the regulations against manual lifting of heavy loads. Often, there is not sufficient training involved on how to properly lift a patient, causing many injuries.
The seed round participants included Spectrum Health, Red Cedar Ventures, Invest Detroit Ventures, MedTech Ventures, and Quantum Medical Concepts, showing the strength of the technology and the statewide support for the company’s efforts.
"Andrew’s leadership, with a strong team and advisory board, have proven instrumental as The Patient Company continues to see positive traction and collaboration with SimPull that meets such an important clinical need. These are just some of the many reasons the investor community continues to support the company and sees more positive news ahead in 2021,” said Jeff Wesley, Executive Director at Red Cedar Ventures.
About The Patient Company
The Patient Company was founded in 2019 to help healthcare systems and employees have access to the best products, devices, and technology that can be developed in the U.S. The Patient Company believes that these products must be supplied to our healthcare systems without them having to fear a financial burden. In short, we create a lifecycle platform for products that make health care systems improve at the organizational level, making clinicians lives better, while reducing the cost passed on to patients. The Patient Company is headquartered in Grand Rapids, MI with offices in Traverse City, MI Scottsdale, AZ. Learn more at www.thepatientcompany.com.
Media Contact:
Ryan Peters
(231) 499-6445