Abram Scientific Raises $11.75M for Critical Care Device
Abram Scientific, a medical device company, has secured $11.75 million in Series A funding led by Octapharma AG. The financing is intended to accelerate the development of its CoagCare™ platform. This portable diagnostic tool is designed to enhance care for patients with bleeding disorders and in critical care medicine.
- The CoagCare™ platform is a point-of-care (POC) viscoelastic coagulation analyzer that provides results in less than 10 minutes from a small blood sample. It's designed to perform a range of tests including thromboelastography, prothrombin time (PT/INR), and activated partial thromboplastin time (aPTT). - Lead investor Octapharma is one of the world's largest human protein manufacturers, specializing in products for hematology, immunotherapy, and critical care. The company has been expanding its production capacity to meet the growing global demand for plasma-based medicines. - Integrating devices like CoagCare™ with Epic EHRs typically involves using middleware to translate device data into HL7 or FHIR (Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources) standards. This process requires careful data mapping to ensure that values like PT/INR populate correctly into patient flowsheets, a critical step for nursing informatics specialists to manage. - From a nursing informatics perspective, a key challenge with EHRs is the significant time spent on documentation, which many ICU nurses feel detracts from direct patient care and contributes to burnout. Common complaints include physician-centric design, redundant data entry, and poor user interfaces, issues that informaticists aim to resolve through workflow optimization. - AI is being increasingly applied to coagulation management to enhance clinical decision support, with models developed to predict risks of thrombosis and bleeding, often outperforming traditional scoring systems. For an informaticist, this means evaluating how to integrate these AI-driven alerts and predictions into the EHR to guide treatment protocols in real-time. - The CMS and ONC Interoperability Rules mandate that healthcare providers and payers adopt standardized APIs, specifically HL7 FHIR, to give patients easier access to their health data. For a new device to be adopted, its data must be exchangeable between different providers and systems, making FHIR compliance a key technical requirement. - Point-of-care coagulation testing offers a faster and more comprehensive alternative to traditional lab tests, enabling quicker clinical decisions in critical settings. However, a barrier to adoption can be the reluctance of healthcare professionals to trust new POC devices over established laboratory methods, especially in high-stakes environments.
