Dan Vahdat was raised in a family of doctors and has worked in the medical field for much of his life. But he’s always been bothered by one part of the whole clinical operation: once a patient leaves the hospital—with all of its connected devices, sensors, computers, etc.—doctors have very little, if any, information about what is going on with that individual.
“When a patient leaves the hospital, we have no idea what they are doing, how they are doing it, or whether something is deteriorating or going in the wrong direction,” Vahdat told Inside Precision Medicine. “As a result, I realized that clinical research and trials must come first, then accelerate the adoption of digital healthcare to know what is happening with the patient.”
So, about ten years ago, Vahdat founded Huma, which began developing software and technology to help rare disease patients by collecting data and interacting with them via mobile phones. Vahdat and Huma spent the next decade developing the disease- and device-agnostic software, known as the “Software as Medical Device” (SaMD) platform, which is now regulated as a medical device in the United States, the European Union, and the United Kingdom. Today, Huma is a global healthcare AI company with modular platforms used by over 3,000 hospitals and clinics, over 35 million screened users, and 4 million registered users in healthcare. It has powered over 800 studies with approximately 1 million participants across research.
However, this entire operation is a significant part of what Huma does, which is not Vahdat’s vision. Instead, Vahdat envisions a future where anyone can take the inner workings of SaMD or any technology and develop new digital solutions for whatever they want—whether to collect data, make diagnostic predictions, or provide clinical decision support—without involving Huma.
Vahdat realized that Huma could provide all of the technology and processes they have created and are now regulated as part of one integrated solution offering, the Huma Cloud Platform. To accomplish this, Huma announced this week that it had raised $80 million in Series D financing to support the launch of its Huma Cloud Platform. The platform offers 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, and more to advance digital-first care and research.
“Accelerating digital-first care and research solutions is no single company’s job and requires the whole ecosystem to work in harmony,” said Vahdat. “The ecosystem has everything from two people in a garage or a doctor in the middle of Tennessee wanting to launch a solution to look after their own patients to obviously large enterprise pharma companies and health systems. Now, everybody else can launch digital-first care or research solutions.”
Letting humans do human things
Certain challenges must be overcome to achieve scalable global adoption of a solution for Huma to become a digital-first healthcare enabler. Vahdat has been leading Huma over the past ten years to solve many technical problems so that clinicians and researchers can focus their time and money on the problems most relevant to their expertise.
“In the old days, if I wanted to launch a website for my company, I had to purchase hardware, configure it, add a server, and install all the software. After that, I may be able to host my own website. But in the new world, you do not do that; instead, you go to Amazon and use their computing resources. You simply build your applications on top of it and forget about it. We hope to accomplish that for the digital hosting industry with the Huma Cloud platform.”
Another important aspect of adoption is ease of use—most people roaming hospitals and labs are not particularly skilled at writing code and executing commands for apps, let alone worrying about how to interact with patients and data. Vahdat believes that Huma’s products have become so user-friendly that almost anyone should be able to log in and complete the entire process of creating a digital-first healthcare app using the Huma Cloud Platform on their own.
“Can I solve all of these problems or simplify it as much as possible for anyone who wants to take on a problem in medicine, disease, or therapeutics and help them focus on their business, the unit economy, the go-to-market, the value added, rather than getting bogged down with all of their time and money on things that should not matter?” Vahdat asked. “By making very simple and friendly, we hope to take the scary part out of digital care transformations and make them much more approachable. Apple did that with their designs to make them more approachable. We are attempting to do so for the digital-first healthcare industry.”
Custom digital healthcare apps at your fingertips
Huma’s approach is like working with digital Legos or a healthcare version of Shopify, where the user can choose modules to put together and create a new, unique app. According to Vahdat, a Pharma CEO can now do what used to take one or two years for a pharmaceutical company to contract and launch.
Vahdat said, “In the past, you had to work with a software development company and tell them what you wanted and did not want. Nine months later, something was built, but it still needed adjustments and another year to complete. Only then could you conduct a pilot, gather information, and submit your project to regulatory bodies, which took an additional two years. By then, you might have a solution and have already spent ten million dollars over three or four years. That’s not a good place to be.”
While Huma has already expedited this entire process, bringing the power of AI into the digital-first healthcare equation can make everything faster. According to Vahdat, their AI, GenAI, takes a lot of guesswork and picking and choosing to build a digital-first solution from scratch. Instead, the user can type what they want into a command line, and Huma will spit out a solution.
“You can write, ‘I want an app for patients with lung cancer and heart failure.’ The GenAI will choose the modules and explain its reasoning,” explained Vahdat. “After that, based on our library of materials, the GenAI writes all the learning materials it believes are pertinent to you. It then leaves it up to you to add anything missing or make any necessary final edits. Suddenly, it completes 40% or 50% of your work for you.”
Vahdat wants to see all of this come together so that a clinician treating a patient can use it in real-time. He imagines a world in which a nurse takes measurements and, rather than looking through charts, feeds the data into algorithms that generate a report. This allows for the observation of many more patients and, hopefully, reduces the number of human errors. However, Vahdat does not expect digital-first care to be error-free; humans will still be required to review and ensure that everything checks out and makes sense.
Bringing healthcare home
Most patient care occurs at home rather than within the clinic’s premises. Yet, according to Vahdat, that is where a lot can go wrong—not just because mistakes can be made by individuals but also because circumstances alter over time. A patient’s care can be customized in between appointments and even daily if their health can be consistently and automatically quantified.
According to Vahdat, the medical field has fallen behind other industries in adopting integrated digital-first solutions, such as travel, banking, and education.
“Healthcare is one of the last remaining industries, and by putting digital first, we not only make care more accessible, but also more consistent, which is a major issue, and ultimately deliver precision medicines to end users. Using data, healthcare can be personalized, proactive, and predictive, as opposed to the unpersonalized, reactive medicines that we currently use.”
After all, Vahdat’s original idea for founding Huma was how to provide patients with technology to quantify their health when no one is watching. Right now, that may be one of the key solutions to optimizing an individual’s health.
