YonaLink, a data capture company with a platform that extracts electronic health record (EHR) data and integrates them with an electronic data capture (EDC) platform, announced Wednesday it had completed an initial funding round that raised $6 million with Debiopharm Innovation Fund as the lead investor. YonaLink’s SaaS platform is built to directly export EHR data in real-time directly into clinical trials EDC systems.
“Real-world data from electronic health records has long been an untapped resource for clinical trials, one which could boost clinical trial efficiency, improve patient outcomes and, ultimately, make research data collection a by-product of routine clinical record keeping,” said Vincent Lepreux, associate director of Debiopharm Innovation Fund, the strategic investment arm of Swiss biopharma company Debiopharm. “We invested in YonaLink because we believe that the way clinical trials have been conducted in the past has to be radically disrupted. YonaLink’s data streaming technology drills into one of the clear inefficiencies in drug development—moving data from EHRs to EDCs.”
The company’s focus is to eliminate the current time-consuming clinical trial data collection methodology that requires clinical trial data to be copied, screen to screen, from medical center health records to the research database (EHR to EDC). According to YonaLink, developing an electronic platform capable of streaming EHR data for EDC in clinical trials can provide capital savings of as much as 30% in a clinical trial, by saving months of time in manual data management.
“Our platform guarantees secure, error-free, live data-streaming that enhances productive collaboration between health care providers and clinical trial researchers,” said Iddo Peleg, CEO and co-founder of YonaLink in a press release announcing the company’s upcoming participation in Summit For Clinical Ops Executives (SCOPE) in February 2023. “The YonaLink model is a much-needed cost- and time-effective solution that propels clinical research by expanding diversity and enrollment in trials, and enables participation of smaller medical centers, while also ensuring patient safety by eliminating manual data capture, monitoring, and conversion.
Headquartered in Boston, with a research and development office in Jerusalem, Israel, YonaLink’s SaaS platform incorporates eConsent and ePRO/eCOA and streaming EHR-to-EDC capabilities. The platform has the capabilities to stream up-to-date data from any clinical site’s EHR system, in any part of the world, and populate it within YonaLink’s next-generation EDC or other data capture systems.
According to Ophir Shahaf a partner at eHealth Ventures, which also participated in the funding round, while clinical trials data capture has been evolving from paper to electronic records, it still relies on many manual processes to compile and integrate the data. “YonaLink is changing the paradigm with a solution that provides true automation,” Shahaf said. “This technology can be used to help reduce the burden on research sites, lower trial costs, and enable efficiencies that speed time to market for clinical trial sponsors. That, in turn, makes a meaningful difference for patients who are waiting for new treatments, which is why we are excited to be part of YonaLink’s journey and this recent funding round.”
In 2021, YonaLink was one of six Israeli-U.S. companies to receive $1 million from the Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation to develop a platform to enroll diverse patients from various sites in clinical trials by automating the clinical trial value chain, from patient selection to data management.
