Israeli startup <a target=new href=http://www.personal-healthwatch.com/>HealthWatch</a> today announced a $20 million investment in the company by Chinese company Yiling, which is traded on the Shenzhen Stock Exchange at a $2.5 billion market cap. Yiling, a leading company in China, specializes in Chinese medicine, and is now establishing a division for devices in conventional medicine. The investment is at a company value of $65 million, after money.
"We sell peace of mind," says HealthWatch chairman Dr. Yoram Romem. His company is developing a shirt for cardiac monitoring and preventing heart attacks. The shirt has already obtained marketing approval in the US.
$15 million of this investment is a direct investment in the company, and $5 million will be paid to Healthwatch for a license to market the company's product in China. Yiling also founded a marketing company, in which HealthWatch is a shareholder, for when Healthwatch obtains a Chinese marketing license. Yiling will invest another few million dollars in this joint company.
The founders of HealthWatch, based in Kfar Saba, are Romem and CFO Amos Shattner. Romem and Shattner, former executives at Sapiens, were among the founders of Pango, and also helped found Hip-Hope Technologies, which developed a pelvis protection product. "Our goal was to develop a product for people over 60," Romem says. "In apps and gaming, everyone admires the young and believes they know what the market wants. In medical monitoring, however, we, the old people, are the ones who consume the products, and no one can argue with us about popular taste." Romem notes that the company has changed a little since then, and is now a young company, but that was the motive for entering the field.
"The product is named Master Caution - the name of the light that goes on in airplanes when there is an obvious problem demanding immediate attention. At first, we wanted to create such a light in the human body, which would warn that something had gone seriously wrong. Only at a later stage did we realize that it had to be a shirt, and then we understood that we could utilize Amos's vast experience in textiles. We also realized that we had to begin only in the cardiac field, and since then, Beilinson Hospital intensive care department manager Prof. David Hasdai joined us."
Romem explains: "The product is designed to provide peace of mind for people at risk, but we're all at some risk all the time, of course. We're all somewhere on the risk continuum."
The product has been approved for marketing in the Europe and the US, and sales are getting under way right now. According to Romem, receipts for using the product constantly can be submitted to insurance companies in the US, and some reimbursement is given. "We believe that we're only at the beginning of insurance reimbursement. The technology is advancing many times faster than the regulation in this field."
"Globes": Do you have competitors?
Romem: "There are many heart monitoring devices, and even several shirts, but most of them don't have the same value as a medical device like the one in the hospital. In order to make a proper EKG, you have to measure the signal at 12 different points on the body distributed in a very particular way, and we've managed to do that. As far as we know, there is no other heart monitoring shirt with FDA approval as a medical device." The shirt broadcasts the data to the attendant doctor and to the patient's cellphone.
Is the product comfortable and fashionable?
"We make a particular point of it. We recruited a leading underwear designer to the company, who makes sure that the product will be extremely pleasant, and we have models of shirts and undershirts for both men and women. The product can be washed. It is not necessary to shave the chest hair in order to get an accurate result."
SHL Telemedicine today reported that it had launched a device capable of taking an EKG reading with 12 electrodes from within a cellphone. Unlike HealthWatch's shirt, however, monitoring is not continuous.
Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on January 2, 2017
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2017