HealthLeap is a South African health tech business that concentrates on the worldwide healthcare sector, starting with the United States.
Dietitians in hospitals can use the company as a clinical aid. It’s coming out of hiding to reveal a $1.1 million pre-seed investment backed by Fifty Years, a deep tech investor.
Malnutrition occurs when the body’s nutrients are deficient, excessive, or imbalanced.
This has the potential to have a severe negative impact on people’s physiology and clinical results.
Malnutrition can occur when people with illnesses are unable to consume sufficient quantity or quality of food, or when their food does not contain enough nutrients to meet the disease’s unique nutritional requirements.
HealthLeap claims to be developing artificial intelligence-assisted tools for healthcare practitioners to better treat hospital malnutrition.
Jemima Meyer, a clinical dietitian, and chief research officer said that as a clinical dietitian, he witnessed many patients suffer from malnutrition that was not appropriately handled in hospitals, partly as a result of clinical dietitians’ understaffing and other physicians’ lack of clinical nutrition training.
He also mentioned that he wished to assist dietitians with the intricate clinical calculations that they must adapt to each patient’s situation and changing medical issues on a regular basis.
Meyer created the initial version of a research-backed productivity tool to assist her coworkers in performing computations, making judgments based on the most recent clinical data, and treating more patients in less time.
They standardized the procedure with her brother, CEO Josiah Meyer, and CTO Ray Botha, and HealthLeap was launched in April 2021.
NutriLeap is the firm’s AI-based clinical aid solution. Its HIPAA-compliant mobile app provides automated clinical calculations and research-backed recommendations to hospital dietitians (and, soon, other healthcare practitioners with whom they interact). This allows them to estimate accurate, tailored dietary needs for patients much more quickly.
According to CTO Botha, the company is forecasting the best therapy measures to make sure that patients get enough nutrients.
Clinicians’ judgments on the app, coupled with data from other sources, such as an EHR integration, will strengthen its forecasts even more.
In a limited beta test, 50 dietitians utilize the app. According to the firm, there are around 1,000 nutritionists, pharmacists, and physicians on the waiting list.
Josiah Meyer, the company’s CEO, remarked that the company believes in the future when nutrition is uniquely adjusted for each individual’s health.
It wants to make nutrition data-driven for everyone, beginning with the people who need it the most: hospital patients. Electronic Health Record data is one key data source that has been opened as a result of the USCDI standards.
The USCDI guidelines, which were finalized in July of last year, enable health tech companies to access health data sources that were previously inaccessible.
And, with the epidemic hastening healthcare professionals’ use of digital tools, HealthLeap’s software is positioned to acquire a major share of the market.
HealthLeap not only assists clinical dietitians and other healthcare organizations (hospital pharmacists, physicians, and nurses) in identifying patients who are in danger of malnutrition, but it also recommends daily amounts of an oral, tube, and IV feeding based on the patient’s ever-changing needs.
The startup stated that it intends to assist dietitians in treating patients even after they have been discharged.
HealthLeap says it will use this pre-seed capital to hire software engineers and data scientists to continue creating smart tools to help clinicians prevent and treat hospital malnutrition.
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