Canopy, the Intelligent Care Platform (ICP) for oncology, formerly known as Expain, today announced it has launched out of stealth and has raised $13 million in funding. The funding was led by GSR Ventures, with participation from Samsung Next, UpWest, and other industry leaders, such as Geoff Calkins (former SVP Product, Flatiron Health), and Chris Mansi (CEO Of Viz.AI). With the launch, Canopy makes its platform generally available to cancer treatment centers across the United States.

Improving clinical outcomes

In the oncology sector, there is a need for software to enable proactive patient care because oncology practices have been using manual processes in an effort to improve patient care for over 20 years, and have had very little impact on practice efficiency, or patient outcomes. Unfortunately, due to the brief and episodic nature of office-based cancer care, up to 50 percent of patient symptoms and treatment side-effects will go undetected. This often leads to avoidable hospital visits and a poor experience, and more importantly, may result in detrimental treatment discontinuations, hurting patients’ survival probability. Lavi Kwiatkowsky, founder and CEO of Canopy, had a personal experience in this regard and he realized the healthcare systems face many challenges in today's episodic care, especially in complex disease areas such as oncology. He realized that care teams are inundated with information, tasks, and challenges, which limits their ability to adopt important technologies to improve care.

Helping patients by helping the practice

Canopy’s mission is to provide every person undergoing cancer treatment with the best possible outcomes and experience. It does so by enabling physicians to interact with their patients continuously and proactively. Essentially, Canopy’s ICP includes a full suite of intelligent, electronic health-record integrated tools such as Remote Patient Monitoring, Chronic and Principal Care Management tools, and Oral Oncolytics solutions to help cancer centers continuously engage with their patients, streamline clinical workflows, and capture new reimbursement streams for their work. As a result, care teams can better direct resources from repetitive manual work to supporting the patients who need them most, leading to life-saving interventions, deeper patient relationships, and improved patient outcomes at lower costs.

Canopy is used by leading oncology practices nationwide. They have had impressive rates regarding patient enrollment (86 percent), engagement (88 percent), retention (90 percent at 6 months), and timely nursing intervention rates (88 percent). Canopy has clinical results slated for publication in 2022 demonstrating reductions in emergency department utilization and inpatient admissions, as well as increases in time on therapy. They are also the preferred vendor for the Quality Cancer Care Alliance (QCCA).

“Having a proactive tool like Canopy removes barriers to care and allows patients to feel safe and share potentially serious symptoms that they may otherwise have not disclosed, and allows us, as a practice, to offer them timely support. This higher level of trust and communication is a subtle, but powerful paradigm shift that we’ve seen lead to dramatically improved outcomes for our patients.” – Jeff Hunnicutt, CEO of Highlands Oncology Group

Canopy was founded in 2018 by Lavi Kwiatkowsky. With the capital raised, they plan on expanding their marketing and sales, and will also recruit over 40 new employees.