- December 22, 2024 4:07 am
- California
Kal Patel
M.D., CEO & Co-Founder
Kal Patel, MD, is a former physician and MBA whose career has been guided by a passion to improve healthcare delivery, adherence and outcomes, with technology. Over the last 20 years, Kal has been the strategic lead on innovations in biopharma, medtech and regulated digital health at Amgen, Novartis, Doctor on Demand and Boston Consulting Group, as well as Flex. In 2018, as a spin-off from Flex, Kal co-founded BrightInsight, to create the leading global regulated digital health platform for biopharma and medtech. His vision was to create a technology infrastructure company that enables biopharma and medtech companies to focus on therapeutic digital innovation, rather than the underlying technology infrastructure. Kal’s leadership has inspired many to join BrightInsight, creating an organization where the employees are as motivated and driven as he is to propel the company forward. Through Kal’s strong network and keen ability to understand the clients’ needs, BrightInsight boasts many of the world’s leading global life science innovators as partners, including AstraZeneca, Roche, CSL Behring and Novo Nordisk.
While serving as head of digital health at Amgen, Kal established the digital health division, developing and commercializing a portfolio of digital products in connected devices and algorithms across global markets.
It was at Amgen that Kal determined how resource-intensive—financially and otherwise—it was to build and maintain regulated, secure digital health infrastructure. That realization was the catalyst to creating BrightInsight.
BrightInsight provides the leading global regulated digital health platform for biopharma and medtech, accelerating regulated digital health innovation through a scalable medical-grade platform. The platform accelerates time to market, minimizes risk and future-proofs digital health products, including connected combination products and medical devices, algorithms, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), dosing calculators, apps and more. The result—BrightInsight’s clients are increasing patient adherence and engagement and accelerating clinical trials across a wide range of therapeutic areas including diabetes, respiratory, oncology, ophthalmology, obesity, hematology, immunology, and neurology, among others.
Its vision is to transform patient outcomes globally by bringing the power of digital technology to healthcare. The BrightInsight Platform is the underlying secure infrastructure that enables the connected apps, devices and digital health products deployed by the world’s leading biopharma and medtech companies. These transformational solutions require a secure and regulatory-compliant backend like BrightInsight. “We are constantly inspired by the apps, algorithms, connected combination products, dosing calculators and more that our customers develop on top of BrightInsight that will truly change the way patients manage their diseases and the way providers prescribe, treat and monitor their patients,” adds Kal.
BrightInsight saves biopharma and medtech companies time and money, and ensures that apps, connected medical devices or combination products, SaMD and algorithms are compliant, secure and scalable. “Before BrightInsight, biopharma and medtech would build their own custom digital platform from the ground up. It could take several years to develop and cost between $10M-$20M—and that’s only to support one product in one region,” adds Kal. “Using our pre-built, robust platform that meets biopharma and medtech security, privacy, quality and regulatory requirements, enables our customers to build scalable digital solutions more quickly and efficiently. We dramatically speed time to market, enable faster scaling and reduce execution, regulatory and other risks.”
Novo Nordisk turned to BrightInsight to develop innovative solutions for diabetes management. Currently, for most people with diabetes, blood glucose data sits within one siloed solution from one manufacturer, requiring manual recording of insulin use. By integrating data from the patient’s continuous blood glucose meter with automatically-recorded insulin dose data from Novo Nordisk’s connected insulin pens, patients are able to manage their diabetes more easily. BrightInsight serves as the underlying platform for Novo Nordisk’s connected insulin pens and enables the data integration from leading third-party blood glucose meters.
BrightInsight recently secured a Series B financing round that will enable the company to achieve significant scale by accelerating team growth, international availability and enhancing the BrightInsight Platform. The funding will be used to grow BrightInsight’s teams around the world, including establishing a regional Customer Delivery Center in London to support European clients and continue international expansion in China and other Asian markets. Further investment will be made in analytics to enable customers to drive more valuable insights faster, and to launch new pre-built software assets to enhance and accelerate digital clinical trials.
In just three years, BrightInsight has more than doubled its team, won contracts with several leading global pharmaceutical companies, and secured $65M in VC funding. Each on its own is a huge achievement for a Silicon Valley technology start up. “We achieved these successes because of the tremendous talent of our employees, the trust of our clients and support from our investors—all of whom realize the tremendous opportunity BrightInsight has to be the de facto regulated digital health platform for biopharma and medtech,” notes Kal.
“The BrightInsight digital health platform for biopharma and medtech accelerates time to market, minimizes risk and future-proofs digital health products, including connected combination products and medical devices, algorithms, Software as a Medical Device (SaMD), dosing calculators, apps and more.”