Funds for 'Global Patient Confidence Score'

Glasgow, Scotland-based 'social intelligence' provider Talking Medicines has secured £1.1m in funding, to support the launch and roll-out of a new AI data platform which it says will 'translate what patients are saying into actionable pharma grade intelligence'.

The company was formed in 2013 and is led by CEO Jo Halliday (pictured) and co-founders Dr Elizabeth Fairley and Dr Scott Crae. The new platform will use patient feedback to calculate a 'global patient confidence score' for each medicine. Plans include the immediate recruitment of nine new employees for its NLP data tech team.

Patients' conversations and behaviour are captured at home, from social media and from connected devices, and mapped to regulated medicine information, allowing the firm to determine trends and patterns of patient sentiment across medicines. Pharmaceutical companies use the data to make patient centric marketing decisions, drive more effective medicines and optimise marketing spend.

The latest round, which brings the firm's total to date to £2.5m, was led by IoT investment specialist Tern Plc, alongside The Scottish Investment Bank, Scottish Enterprise's investment arm.

Halliday says of the news: 'We are delighted that Tern is joining our investor group, and [Tern CEO] Al Sisto will be bringing his wealth of experience to the Board. Now more than ever we passionately believe that big pharma needs a systematic way to make data driven decisions through accessing high grade social intelligence driven from the patient. This investment will scale our team and the development of our AI, ML, NLP tech tools to translate what patients are saying into actionable pharma grade intelligence through our global patient confidence score by medicine'.

Web site: www.talkingmedicines.com .