Huma, the London-based healthcare technology company, began life in 2011 as a patient monitoring software company and started to build the infrastructure to run its digital health apps. Over the years, it also began to develop the technology to be able to run decentralized and hybrid clinical trials with phama customers. Huma saw a boost in its fortune during the pandemic when the U.K.’s National Health Service deployed Huma’s Medopad technology to virtually monitor all Covid-19 patients.
Now in 2024 the company is announcing its latest incarnation: a driver of healthcare digitization. In a news release in mid-July, the company announced that it had raised $80 million in a Series D funding round and is launching the Huma cloud platform to lend its technology stack to those who want to build apps off of that and supercharge digital tech adoption. Specifically, the technology will allow users access to a “no-code configuration of regulated disease management tools for any therapeutic area, a library of pre-built modules and device connectivity capabilities. a cloud-agnostic framework for flexible hosting, readily available APIs and integration capabilities, the ability to host and deploy diagnostic and predictive AI algorithms, a marketplace…,” according to a July 14 press release. The company billed it as a “Shopify” for digital health.
The goal is to and more easily advance digital-first care and research.
A Huma senior executive believes the robustness of the cloud platform dates back to its early days since it had to develop an easily configurable program to manage rare disease patients. But being a point solution was not something Huma was interested in.
“We didn’t want to be a diabetes app or a migraine solution,” sad said Mert Aral, Huma’s chief medical officer in a recent Zoom interview. . “We wanted to be an enterprise kind of platform technology solution whereby you can sort of deploy different solutions for disease management or run clinical trials and do screening initiatives and so on and so forth.”
Since then, customers in U.K., Germany, Turkey and Saudi Arabia have tapped the company to conduct remote monitoring, research, screenings and risk assessment. Aral said Huma has been making in roads into the United States, more so recently since CPT codes were adopted for remote patient monitoring.
Customers like Bayer and AstraZeneca have been using Huma’s technology for large scale cardiology screening and respiratory management respectively. In fact, Huma entered the U.S. market with AstraZeneca roughly 18 months ago, he pointed out. Huma has non-pharma customers in the U.S. as well. For instance it has research initiatives with Stanford, Johns Hopkins and Tulane University. The company is also working with providers to monitor groups of patients.
“We bring the software, we bring the devices, we onboard them. And our teams will do the monitoring, and based on certain criteria, if there’s an issue with a patient, we will escalate them back to the provider. So we’re almost working as an extension of the provider,” Aral explained. “And at the same time, we also provide billing support because you have the CPT codes for remote monitoring. So then that becomes a new revenue stream for the clinic or the hospital. But because these codes are still new, it still requires a bit of hand-holding.”
Some provider customers include Hartford Health, NY Allergy and Sinus Centres, Beverly Hills Lung Institute, Central Georgia Cancer Center, New Mexico Cancer Center and Ohio State University Medical Center.
Now having deployed around 450 unique configurations for different therapy areas — be it in cardiology or pre-post-op monitoring or orthopedics and more — Mert said Huma wanted to bring that expertise to anyone who wanted to customize a digital health solution but not have to build that from scratch.
“We basically spent 10 years investing into this infrastructure to make it scalable, to build it in a way that is cloud agnostic, which means that I can basically spin out any of my services, any of my products in any geography, on any cloud,” Aral declared. “For example, in Saudi [Arabia]we’re on Oracle cloud. We can spin out instances on private government clouds. We have instances on AWS, Google cloud, in China, Alibaba….”
The other advantage, besides flexibility, is reliability.
“If you’re building on top of our infrastructure, you don’t have to worry about data privacy, data security, cloud hosting … so it’s all sorted,” Ayal said. “Our core flagship product is FDA cleared, Class II software-as-medical device, EUFDR-cleared, Saudi FDA-cleared, MDSAP-cleared. It’s got all of the regulatory approvals and it’s disease agnostic.
The promise of the Huma cloud Platform is already exciting prospective customers, he said noting that within the first 48 hours of the announcement that the Huma cloud platform with GenAI integrations was available, 77 enterprise customers signed up to be on the waiting list.
“Wow. Anyone from like big pharma companies like Nova Nordisk to health systems and, you know, startup founders and you name it,” he said of the interest the platform received.
The platform now has its first customer — Evital, a health subsidiary of Turkish holding company Eczacıbaşı Group. By leveraging the Huma cloud platform and its monitoring and other capabilities, Evital will be able to better care for patients outside clinical settings while focusing on preventive and reducing provider burnout, according to an announcement from the company.
“We’re not in the Turkish market but they have an application today that does teleconsultation and appointment booking,” Aral said. “But they want to bring all of the capabilities that we have as Huma into their own application, which means they can be a client of the Huma cloud platform and the SDK (software development kit) and everything like that. And they can basically take whatever they need and plug it into their own application.”
Huma’s website and press releases boast of high uptake — the company’s technology has been used in projects in more than 3,000 hospitals and clinics. The platform has been used to engage and screen over 35 million people. Currently, the company has 1.8 million active users across its products in more than 70 countries.
Those are impressive numbers. Still, like many high-growth health tech companies, profitability is a target it has yet to reach.
“I’m the chief medical officer, but I’ll tell you as much as I can,” Aral said. “We basically are about to be profitable by the end of this year. We’re very much on track for that. And, that’s for us a massive achievement, you know, given the digital health ecosystem and how the various companies are struggling and so on. But I can tell you that we’ve been growing from a revenue perspective year on year quite significantly. And last year, I think we closed around $40, $50 million.”
