W2O Group is excited to partner with Baylor Scott & White Health (BSWH) to launch their inaugural Digital Summit in Austin, TX today! The event was dreamed up as a way to connect executives at the BSWH with innovators across multiple industries to inspire them to improve patient and physician experiences by utilizing innovative technologies.
The summit will consist of speaker panels featuring proven innovators, health startups pitching for an accelerated path to a pilot at BSWH and an interactive session featuring hands on demos of innovative technologies changing the healthcare world.
To give you an idea of the companies participating in the summit, we asked a few of them to share some thoughts on what they would want the world to know about their organization and their work.
Greatbatch & Witricity
Wireless data transmission has become ubiquitous in our daily lives, yet we continue to struggle with power cords and power transfer limitations. Unlike the consumer electronics and automotive industries, where wireless energy is reaching an inflection point, the healthcare industry has yet to harness its potential. With over 51 million surgeries taking place annually in US operating rooms that are frequently challenged with a tangle of procedure hampering cords, significant opportunity exists to apply wireless to untether the healthcare space for physicians and their patients, enabling therapy delivery with fewer limitations.
The time is now for the development of wireless power transfer, which holds the potential to improve how healthcare is delivered in myriad ways. For example, many of today’s active medical implantable devices are large, require several hours to recharge, and have limitations due to the efficiency and level of power that can be delivered. Wireless power transfer will enable these devices to become much smaller, expanding surgical approach options for physicians, allowing deeper implantations and higher power levels, as well as eliminating the need for follow-on battery replacement surgery in some applications. Patients will experience improved comfort with easier charging.
Another area of potential improvement includes operating rooms and surgical tools. Today, surgical tools either utilize large rechargeable batteries or are tethered to an unwieldy cord that frequently tangles, presents tripping hazards, poses an increased infection risk and can negatively affect the ergonomics of the tool. With wireless energy transfer, surgical tools will utilize smaller batteries or none at all, making them much easier to handle and increasing usability while eliminating time spent managing cords. These improvements may ultimately improve performance, shorten procedure times and positively impact patient outcomes.
Finally, significant opportunity exists to enhance the medical experience for patients, who often seem “wrapped” in cords. One particularly poignant example of this involves a mother who was unable to hold her newborn in the NICU due to the cord web surrounding him. And while it’s not a panacea, embedding the technology in a range of monitors, often in concert with wireless data, could significantly lessen the physical ties encumbering a patient.
Power and disruptive innovation are core to Greatbatch’s roots. Wilson Greatbatch, the co-inventor of the first successful implantable pacemaker, founded the company in 1970 to develop long-lived batteries to fuel life-saving/life-enhancing medical devices. Today, Greatbatch is one of the largest medical device outsource (MDO) manufacturers in the world, providing innovative, high quality medical technologies for the cardiac, neuromodulation, orthopedics, vascular, advanced surgical and portable medical markets. Our vision is to enhance the lives of patients worldwide by being our customers’ partner of choice for innovative medical technologies and services. We believe that advancing wireless energy is central to achieving this vision, as it will bring transformational change to healthcare and empower physicians, healthcare professionals and their patients. Together with WiTricity and our partners we look forward to building the wireless surgical suite, patient room and therapy and mobility devices of the future.
Spot On Sciences
Spot On Sciences, Inc. develops and markets innovative medical devices to improve collection and storage of biological fluids for medical testing. The premier product, HemaSpot™, is a simple to use device for self sampling and robust storage/shipping of blood samples at room temperature. HemaSpot™ uses a finger stick to collect and dry blood within a protective cartridge which can be easily mailed to a medical test site for analysis.
80% of healthcare decisions are based on diagnostic testing, but costs only 2% of total healthcare expenditures. Precision medicine is highly dependent on personalized medical testing and thus improvements in diagnostic testing has been targeted as one of top requirements for improving health and reducing healthcare costs.
However, current methods for getting a blood sample by phlebotomy is outmoded, costly, inefficient and highly inconvenient and difficult for patients- especially for homebound, elderly and patients in remote areas.
Spot On Sciences enables a new model for collecting blood samples and generating health data: move the sample instead of requiring the patient or the lab to move. Our new blood collection devices HemaSpot, makes blood sample collection and transport very easy and efficient and delivers a high-quality sample to a lab for detection of numerous markers for infectious disease and health status. Mobilizing blood samples and delivering data by mobile phone offers a simple but powerful method for increasing access to health information, especially for remote or low resource areas.
HemaSpot, an innovative and easy to use device, enables a blood sample to be self-collected from any location and at any time. Using a finger stick by lancet, two drops of blood are applied to the HemaSpot device and the blood wicks into a pre-cut absorbent paper. The cartridge is then snapped closed and the blood is dried by a desiccant within the cartridge, leaving the sample stable at ambient temperature with no refrigeration or cold chain requirements. The enclosed cartridge prevents sample contamination and reduces biohazard risk from downstream handling; the robust cartridge can literally be run over by a truck and dropped into water without damage. Sample collection takes less than 5 minutes and is immediately ready for transport to a lab – via mail, dropbox, or even by drone – for analysis.
Two devices are currently on the market: HemaSpot-HF for whole blood and HemaSpot-SE for separated blood (cells separated from plasma) from a fingerstick.
By making it easy and convenient for consumers to provide a blood sample, access to medical testing is improved for the entire population and especially for underserved populations such as elderly, home bound, low income and from remote areas. For healthcare providers, having timely and increased access to test results could significantly improve diagnosis and improve patient health. The HemaSpot blood collection device is a simple tool and solution that can revolutionize medical testing and allow us to realize the promise of precision and personalized medicine.
Imprivata
Imprivata, the healthcare IT security company, provides healthcare organizations globally with a security and identity platform that delivers authentication management, fast access to patient information, secure communications, and positive patient identification. In healthcare, it all starts with the patient and their protected health information (PHI), so healthcare organizations go through extraordinary means to put IT security systems in place – designed to keep PHI in, but not let it out – creating barriers to protect PHI such as complex passwords and security policies that impede workflow.
Imprivata removes those barriers, allowing care providers to securely and efficiently ACT: Access, Communicate, and Transact PHI to address critical compliance and security challenges while improving productivity and the patient experience. With Imprivata solutions, hospitals can correctly identify patients at registration and providers can access PHI conveniently on-site or at home, communicate PHI using multiple devices, and transact PHI for important clinical workflows, including electronic prescribing of controlled substances (EPCS) order signing and medical device access.
Imprivata offers a platform of security products designed to enable healthcare to ACT with patient information both securely and with conveniently, including:
Imprivata PatientSecure, the biometric patient identification platform that positively identifies patients using palm vein recognition, creating a 1:1 link between a patient and their health record across multiple systems. PatientSecure improves patient safety and minimizes patient identification mistakes and duplicate medical records that traditional oral and paper-based patient identification methods cause.
Imprivata OneSign, an enterprise-level single sign-on (SSO) and virtual desktop access solution that streamlines desktop roaming and automates access in one seamless, secure system. OneSign improves provider productivity and eliminates the user frustration, time inefficiencies, and security issues that password-heavy access systems cause.
Imprivata Cortext, a secure, integrated communications platform for healthcare. Cortext improves care coordination by replacing the inefficiencies of pagers and solving the security and compliance issues that unsecure texting practices cause.
Imprivata Confirm ID, the comprehensive identity and two-factor authentication platform for remote access, EPCS, medical device access, and other clinical authentication workflows. Confirm ID offers the broadest and most flexible range of authentication options to eliminate the barriers to transacting patient information that traditional authentication technologies cause.
We are so excited to learn and be inspired by the companies that will be participating in the summit. Check back soon to learn about the additional companies that will be participating in today’s summit!
Steven Cutbirth currently serves as the Operations Lead for MDigitalLife. Connect with him on LinkedIn or say hi to him on Twitter at @SvenC!
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