Surgical Safety Technologies (SST), a medical technology company that engineered the OR Black Box® platform for hospitals, has today announced $15 Million in Series A funding. The round was led by U.S. Venture Partners and Santé Ventures, and will be used to accelerate the company’s automation initiatives and commercial efforts. SST’s platform leverages AI both to inform real-time decision making and provide analytical insight in the areas of safety, compliance and efficiency, which drastically improves patient outcomes and reduces hospital costs.
SST has nearly 60 employees across its Toronto and New York offices and operates with a single mission in mind: to make healthcare safer globally through improved knowledge of clinical practices. The company currently has its Black Box® platform and analytic products deployed in critical interventional hospital environments such as surgical operating rooms, trauma centers and simulation centers – powering better analytics, benchmarking and process improvement. The various Black Box technologies are in use within many of the leading academic healthcare providers in the United States, Canada, and Western Europe, and provide novel insights that result in reduced errors, improved safety, and significant cost savings.
“I am honored to have this support and confidence as we continue our mission of making healthcare safer and more cost-effective,” noted Teodor Grantcharov, founder of Surgical Safety Technologies. “Raising this round of financing offers incredible validation for our approach as a company, but most importantly, it helps get this technology into more operating rooms where it is needed most. There is more work yet to be done and we hope that our technology continues to play a direct role in saving many more lives in the future.”
Dafina Toncheva, General Partner at U.S. Venture Partners, adds that “USVP is thrilled to partner with SST as it grows its commercial footprint. SST’s novel enterprise software and analytic platform provides unique insights which are utilized by major hospitals across North America and Europe to improve patient outcomes and increase operating efficiency. It is our expectation that every hospital will need SST’s solutions for continuous improvement in surgical, trauma and interventional procedural outcomes to compete effectively and to secure accreditation in the future.”
Clinical studies have demonstrated that use of the OR Black Box® platform significantly improves compliance to standard operating procedures (such as the World Health Organization’s surgical safety checklist) as well as clinical performance, and has resulted in dramatic reduction of never events and improved patient safety outcomes. Initial results have also demonstrated opportunities for significant cost reductions as a consequence of equipment standardization, and data-driven scheduling and OR utilization.
“We are pleased to support SST and bring their extraordinary technology into more operating rooms across the country,” noted Dennis McWilliams, partner at Santé Ventures. “We have been following a number of companies in this space, and found SST to be a leader in both technology and business model given their unique value proposition to hospital systems. Surgical Safety Technologies is developing the operating room of the future, with products that are consistent with Santé’s mission of investing in health technologies making meaningful patient impact.”