MedAware, an Israeli startup specializing in big data analytics for the prescription drug market, announced today the completion of a $1M Series A round led by equity crowdfunding platform OurCrowd together with GE Ventures. According to the company, the money raised will be used to drive initial sales to healthcare providers, insurance companies and large pharmacy chains.

It only took a year

OurCrowd and GE Ventures hammered out a cooperation deal to seek out and possibly invest in joint ventures within the OurCrowd portfolio this past November. In the deal, OurCrowd pointed to the vast resources of the mega conglomerate, along with its sheer reputational clout, as some of the benefits it expected to leverage from partnering with GE. In turn, the venture arm of the massive multi-national was keen on gaining early access to some of the most promising emerging startups coming out of the Holy Land.

A year later, GE is already cashing in on a hot-tip prospect with its first co-investment in an OurCrowd company:

“MedAware embodies many of the same technologies we’ve seen accompany the emergence of the Industrial Internet,” said Jason Sibley, Director of Healthcare Ventures at GE Ventures, in an official statement. “From big data and analytics to machine learning and digital communications, the company aligns perfectly with GE’s vision for a healthcare industry driven by technology and built for improving lives.”

The value of conventional wisdom

And how exactly is MedAware expected to live up to Sibley’s expectations? The big data startup applies the concepts of machine learning and large scale information analysis of Electronic Medical Records (or EMRs) to profile typical prescription patterns of various patient demographics. These profiles allow MedAware to head off case specific anomalies that may be indicative of possible machine and/or human error in the data driven behemoth that informs the prescription drug process between doctor and patient.

“Three years ago I came across a tragic case of a nine-year-old Israeli boy who died because his primary-care physician accidentally prescribed the wrong drug,” said MedAware Co-Founder and CEO Gidi Stein. “The ease with which a little boy died because of a mistaken click of a button was horrifying to me as a physician and as a parent. We have founded MedAware in order to try and prevent such cases.”

MedAware maintains that morbidity, mortality and wasteful healthcare costs, all byproducts of prescription drug process errors, are harming hundreds of thousands of people annually in the United States alone. That is not to mention the exorbitant costs involved in making such errors, legal and otherwise.

According to IMS Health, a global leader in healthcare research, the international pharmaceutical industry is expected to top $1T in sales this year. That’s a lot of dollar representative drugs to have to track. If MedAware can siphon off just a tiny fraction of this cash flow by helping the tracking and analysis department, even GE might feel a difference in its pockets when the ROI comes in.

And of course it can save lives too, each one being priceless (I’m not that callus).

All in all, it’s a pretty good first investment in Startup Nation by the boys and girls over at General Electric.