xWave Technologies, an Irish healthtech start-up headquartered at NovaUCD, recently announced that it has closed an over-subscribed €1.3 million seed funding round led by a number of private investors, including €250k from Enterprise Ireland. The company is on a mission to save lives by ensuring that patients get the best test first. The US Food and Drug Administration has highlighted that up to 50% of advanced radiology scans may be unnecessary and not of benefit to the patients that they are performed on. This can result in long waiting lists and poor patient outcomes, including delayed diagnoses, missed diagnoses and unnecessary radiation exposure. It also costs health systems the substantial sums of money spent annually on unnecessary radiology scans.
In 2021, xWave Technologies launched xRefer, a smart radiology referral platform. xRefer uses market-leading evidence to support clinicians in ordering the most appropriate radiology scan for their patient. As a cloud-based platform, available on web, iOS and Android apps, xRefer enables clinicians to quickly create and send evidence-based digital radiology referrals from anywhere, to any hospital or imaging centre, whether public or private. xWave has already demonstrated a positive impact in Irish hospitals where use of xRefer has reduced the average time taken to create, send and have a referral reviewed by a radiologist by 99.6%. This has enabled scheduling of patient appointments to occur a week and a half earlier on average.
Furthermore, it is predicted by xWave that the national roll-out of xRefer across the Irish healthcare system will reduce duplicate and unnecessary radiology referrals by more than 60%, delivering a significant reduction on the radiology waiting list that continues to grow post-Covid.
Mitchell O’Gorman, CEO, xWave Technologies, said, “We are delighted to have closed this €1.3 million seed funding round. The data that we have already seen from the use of xRefer in the Irish healthcare system indicates we can potentially eliminate radiology waiting lists in Ireland and abroad by removing unnecessary tests and ensuring that patients get the best test first.”
He added, “We already have partnerships in place with two of the largest radiology societies in the world, the European Society of Radiology and the Royal College of Radiologists in the UK. This funding will enable xWave capitalise on commercial opportunities that we now have in the Irish, UK, and Northern European markets.”
xWave Technologies, an Enterprise Ireland high-potential start-up, supported by the HSE Digital Transformation Team, was established in 2020 by a group of leading Irish radiologists who were looking to solve the problems that they face in their day-to-day work.
The company has also recently submitted an international patent application, in partnership with University College Dublin (UCD), to use AI and machine learning to build out the next generation of diagnostic referral tools, with a greater focus on personalised and predictive medicine. Work on this collaborative research project is already underway with CeADAR, Ireland’s Centre for Applied AI based at UCD. The project, led by Ricardo Simon Carbajo, CeADAR’s Head of Innovation and Development, has been funded through the Enterprise Ireland Innovation Partnership Programme
