Cornerstone AI Raises $5 Million Seed to Solve Healthcare’s Data Problem

Cornerstone AI, a new company solving healthcare’s data challenges to improve research and care, publicly launched its first-of-its-kind AI platform. Cornerstone is developing highly intelligent, automated software to accurately and efficiently clean and prepare data in a fraction of the time of traditional methods. Its software can significantly accelerate data analysis and healthcare research. Cornerstone’s founders incubated the company in partnership with Initiate Studios, a new venture studio that co-creates companies at the intersection of healthcare, life sciences and technology.

The company also announced a $5 million seed round led by Healthy Ventures. The raise marked the first investment for Initiate’s affiliated fund, Initiate Ventures. Healthy Ventures General Partner Anya Schiess and Initiate’s Rowan Chapman and lana Dimkova have joined Cornerstone’s board of directors. Funds will be used to further product development and scale the business to meet demand.

Cornerstone debuts at a time when data powers much of the innovation in the healthcare space. For the data to be meaningful and yield insights that impact lives, it must be accurate, connected, standardized and trusted. This is difficult to achieve given the exponential rise in volume and complexity compounded by the manual processes currently in place to prepare data for analysis.

“AI/ML is revolutionizing the healthcare industry,” said Schiess. “But in order for an AI system to work, datasets must be complete, and they must be accurate. Cornerstone is taking a novel approach that uses AI to make the data itself better, which translates to better AI systems and ultimately better healthcare.”

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Currently, 300 petabytes of healthcare data are generated each day. Unfortunately the manually created rules tasked with cleaning this data are not up to the challenge. As a result, data scientists typically spend 80% of their time on data cleaning, rather than on analysis and discovery itself, costing billions annually. The most advanced teams spend precious time developing internal tools to tackle aspects of this issue, but rarely have the staff, focus or time to create a comprehensive solution.

“Data quality has become one of the biggest problems in the healthcare industry – one that has significant consequences,” said Cornerstone Co-founder and CEO Michael Elashoff. “Poor quality data leads to drug development being delayed, patients being misdiagnosed and inaccurate scientific conclusions. Cornerstone was created to efficiently solve these problems at a time when resources are precious. In doing so, Cornerstone ensures that healthcare is not compromised because of bad data, while freeing up data scientists and researchers to do the work that matters.”

Bringing Accuracy, Intelligence and Speed to Data Preparation

Cornerstone provides a first-of-its-kind software to improve the speed and precision of data preparation. It automatically structures and corrects data, allowing teams to use more patients, more data points and arrive at more precise analyses. The novel self-learning AI methods are backed by a regulatory grade audit trail.

Cornerstone is already working with companies across multiple medical areas, data sources and volumes. According to feedback, customers have achieved outstanding results. A medical device company used to spend six months manually cleaning each new dataset; with Cornerstone that time was reduced to just nine days – a 20x time savings. Similar results have been seen on medical record data, clinical trial/registry data, and digital health data.

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Built on Experience

Cornerstone was created by Elashoff, who has more than 20 years experience in machine learning and biostatistics, including time spent as an FDA statistical reviewer and team leader, and Andrew Howland, who was previously the director of data science at Medidata Solutions. The pair met at Medidata, after the company acquired Patient Profiles, a startup Elashoff had founded to develop machine learning and AI methods for clinical trials. Through their respective experiences, Elashoff and Howland understood the dirty data problem firsthand.

They came up with a highly advanced solution to the problem and connected with former colleague Rowan Chapman who had recently founded a venture of her own – Initiate Studios. Chapman, along with Initiate’s co-founders Dimkova and Jessica Owens, invited Cornerstone to become the first company incubated in Initiate Studios.

“If you talk to any analyst or data scientist in healthcare today, they will tell you that the rote process of cleaning data keeps them from important work. It is an enormous source of frustration and cost, and it can leave organizations working relatively blindly if not performed well,” said Chapman. “Mike, Andrew, and our whole Cornerstone team is devoted to changing this process to free up people to do what they’ve trained to do – to make scientific breakthroughs that will impact lives.”

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