BEKHealth, founded in 2016 and based in New York City, addresses one of the most persistent and costly bottlenecks in clinical research: finding the right patients for clinical trials. The majority of clinical trials struggle to enroll on time, and many fail to recruit enough eligible participants at all, delaying or derailing the development of new treatments. BEKHealth uses artificial intelligence to make patient identification dramatically faster and more accurate.
The platform applies natural language processing and machine learning to both structured and unstructured electronic health record data, including physician notes and clinical charts that traditional database queries cannot interpret. By reading and understanding this messy, narrative clinical data, BEKHealth can identify protocol-eligible patients that conventional recruitment methods miss. The company reports that its technology surfaces eligible patients significantly faster than manual review, with high accuracy in matching patients against complex trial eligibility criteria.
BEKHealth serves research sites, health systems, and trial sponsors, helping them screen, recruit, and analyze patient populations for clinical research. By converting the unstructured contents of health records into searchable, matchable signals, the platform reduces the labor-intensive chart review that typically slows recruitment, and it helps sites participate in trials they might otherwise lack the capacity to support.
In February 2025 BEKHealth raised $4 million in a round co-led by Hatteras Venture Partners and Boston Millennia Partners, with participation from existing investors Excelerate Health Ventures and Martin Ventures, as well as new investors RTI International and WakeMed Innovation Fund. The company has raised a total of roughly $18.7 million across multiple rounds. By using AI to unlock the patient signal trapped in health records, BEKHealth aims to make clinical trials faster to fill and more accessible to a broader range of patients and sites.