May-2022
Able Innovations announces $7.5 million to take the pain out of patient transfer
The Toronto-based robotic medical device startup (and Innovation Factory HEALTHI program participant) focuses on the problem of patient transfer—a run-of-the-mill, labour-intensive procedure that usually involves some combination of porters, nurses, and orderlies lifting a patient from point a to point b, sometimes using bed sheets or a slider board.
The typical patient transfer process as “pretty crude,” adding that it can cause pain to patients and result in hospital staff experiencing injuries. Amid an already short-staffed healthcare system during COVID-19, the issues associated with this routine task have become magnified.
Enter Able Innovations, which has built a robotic medical device designed to address the problem of patient transfer, called the ALTA Platform. To date, the startup has secured $7.5 million CAD in previously unannounced venture capital and grant funding, and the support of doctors like Puri to develop and begin rolling out its solution.
“The best solutions are the ones that change the standard of care, and sometimes they’re super, super simple,” said Puri. “And this is that thing. It’s very, very simple—it’s a lateral transfer. It happens millions, if not billions of times a day, around the world, but nobody cares about it.”
Read the full Betakit article here