JCI Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Johnson Controls, led a $2 million investment in Artisight on 30^th April 2022, according to PitchBook. Based in Glenview, Illinois, USA, formerly known as Whiteboard Coordinator, Artisight positions itself as a provider of “the operating system for smart hospitals”. The Artisight name reflects the company's goal of providing a digital sixth sense — artificial sight — to healthcare organizations.

Founded in 2017, the firm has developed an IoT sensor network for healthcare created to improve organizational operations and financial performance. Designed by physicians, operational experts, and AI scientists, this platform claims to not only use AI to analyze data, it uses AI to generate new and previously inaccessible data sets. The firm lists 48 employees on LinkedIn.

The HIPAA (Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act) compliant platform is focused on four key areas where artificial intelligence is gaining traction in hospital operations and enhancing patient safety, including In-Patient Remote Monitoring, Virtual Nurse Assistant, Surgery Optimization, and Telehealth. 

'While solving productivity problems in the operating room using our sensor infrastructure, it became clear that our platform was extensible to emergency rooms, ambulatory clinics, patient rooms, hospital parking lots, and more,' says CEO Dr. Andrew Gostine. 'We set out to create a smart operating room, but ended up with a platform for the smart hospital to accelerate healthcare's digital transformation.'

Their In-Patient Remote Monitoring solution is based on Intelligent sensors, storage hardware and AI Built on a network powered by the NVIDIA Clara™Guardian application framework and NVIDIA AI Computing Platform with Dell PowerEdge Servers and Dell EMC PowerScale for long-term storage. 

Artisight has also partnered with AT&T to help bring 5G to hospitals. The Artisight smart telemonitoring solution highlights how AT&T 5G can play a role in improving patient care in clinical settings. The Artisight solution, which uses computer vision technology and smart cameras, runs over their 5G network to provide a “digital window” into patient rooms. 5G’s low latency and high data speeds make this possible. The Artisight telemonitoring solution can monitor patients in various parts of the hospital on a single screen. This means staff can focus on their normal duties instead of having to sit with patients. And because the Artisight solution also uses machine learning, it can detect patient movement. This can help reduce the risk of patient falls, a $50 billion problem in the industry.

Thermal cameras and remote monitoring offered through a Northwestern Medicine partnership with Artisight improved patient care during the pandemic. As COVID-19 hospitalizations surged in April 2020, Northwestern Medicine faced the challenge of safely and effectively caring for patients in rooms not typically used for intensive care but repurposed for it due to the influx of individuals admitted. Because these rooms often lacked windows, medical staff needed to enter them more frequently, putting them at increased risk of exposure to COVID-19 and requiring additional use of personal protective equipment (PPE). More than 700 telemonitoring cameras were installed, enabling clinicians to remotely check in on patients and avoid non-essential room entry. The cameras feature a pan-tilt-zoom that lets clinicians monitor both patients and ventilators, which require continual observation.

Memoori believes that this strategic investment will complement Johnson Controls’ suite of connected solutions for healthcare facilities offered by the OpenBlue Healthcare platform. 

Other building technology incumbents have also invested in the healthcare sector. In May 2020, Honeywell Ventures participated in a funding round for Tagnos, a developer of workflow orchestration software for hospital operations. 

The goal to digitize healthcare facilities through platforms which integrate building IoT systems with overall hospital operations software is central to the strategy of the incumbent major building automation players in this vertical market.

This article was written by Daphne Tomlinson, Senior Research Associate at Memoori.