HealthLeap, a South Africa-based health tech startup that focuses on global healthcare market has secured a $1.1M pre-seed fund.
Dietitians in hospitals can use the startup as a clinical aid.
It’s coming out 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 diseases are unable to consume sufficient quantity or quality of food, or when their diet does not contain enough nutrients to meet the unique nutritional requirements.
HealthLeap claims to be developing artificial intelligence-assisted tools for healthcare practitioners to better treat hospital malnutrition.
“As a clinical dietitian, I saw many patients suffer because malnutrition was not adequately addressed in hospitals,” clinical dietitian and chief research officer Jemima Meyer told TechCrunch.
“Partly because clinical dietitians are understaffed, and other clinicians are not adequately trained in clinical nutrition.”
“I intended to assist dietitians with the difficult clinical calculations that they must continually adapt to each patient’s unique situation and changing medical state.”
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.
HealthLeap was launched in April 2021. Together with her brother and CEO Josiah Meyer and CTO Ray Botha, they standardized the process.
The company’s AI-based clinical assistant product is named NutriLeap.
Its HIPAA-compliant mobile app provides automated clinical calculations and research-backed suggestions 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.
“We’re projecting the best therapeutic measures to guarantee patients get enough nourishment,” CTO Botha stated.
“The clinical decisions made within our app, along with data from other sources, such as an EHR integration, will improve our forecasts even further.”
According to the firm, there are around 1,000 nutritionists, pharmacists, and physicians on the waiting list.
HealthLeap claims to desire to eliminate hospital malnutrition around the world.
And, with the pandemic hastening healthcare professionals’ use of digital tools, the software created by HealthLeap is positioned to acquire a major share of the market.
HealthLeap not only assists clinical dietitians and other healthcare providers (hospital pharmacists, physicians, and nurses) in identifying patients who are at risk of malnutrition, but it also recommends daily amounts of oral, tube, and IV feeding based on the patient’s ever-changing needs.
The company stated that it intends to assist dietitians in treating patients even after they have been discharged.
HealthLeap is still in the early stages of revenue generation. But that won’t be the case for much longer.
According to the company’s preliminary price analysis, 97 percent of its target users are willing to pay a monthly subscription fee out of pocket for NutriLeap access.
HealthLeap plans to use the pre-seed funding to hire software engineers and data scientists to continue developing smart solutions to aid physicians in the prevention and treatment of hospital malnutrition.
