Nearly three years after its inception in 2011, a University startup named AlertWatch Inc. has been approved for the sale of its firs product in the medical market. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration gave its approval for the operating room software on Feb. 11.
AlertWatch is a monitor software for operating rooms that was developed to improve situational awareness and patient safety. In a dashboard display, the product consolidates patient history, physiological monitors and lab values to create an easy-to-read summary of a patient’s status.
AlertWatch CEO Justin Adams, a University alum, described the product’s comprehensive light display and its potential to create a safer operating environment. The system uses color cues as part of its display: green as good, red as bad and yellow as somewhere in between.
“The idea is to take all of the data and all of the signals and recognize that there’s a limit to what people can comprehend, and we want to make it very obvious when problems are happening,” Adams said.
The Office of Technology Transfer paired Adams with the two founders of the company in spring 2012. Anesthesiology Department Chair Kevin Tremper has been piloting the innovation under his own supervision for the past two years.
Driven by his interest in patient safety, Tremper founded the program alongside James Bagian, former NASA astronaut and current director of the Center for Health Engineering in the department of anesthesia.
After Bagian left NASA in 1995, he became both the Veterans Health Administration’s chief patient safety and systems innovation officer and the director of the VA National Center for Patient Safety, and has since transferred this patient safety focus towards developing and marketing the new product.
In a press release published Feb. 11, Tremper contrasted old medical technologies with those of the future.
“Forty years ago, we used the familiar wavy lines — EKG, heart rate and blood pressure — to monitor our patients,” Tremper said. “Today, we’re still using the same wavy lines, but we have all of this other patient information digitized and available. I wanted a tool that helped put all of that background patient information in context with everything else going on live in the operating room.”
In addition to the University Medical Center, the software is being used at the University of Vermont and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Adams said feedback remains the most positive among newer practitioners, and that his biggest focus at the present moment is convincing less enthusiastic clinicians that the product will significantly improve the quality of their care.
A statistic displayed on the homepage of AlertWatch’s official website, cites a study performed at the University, which found that 85 percent of clinicians agreed that the product meets its ultimate goal of improving patient safety.
Currently, the company is targeting large training hospitals whose incoming practitioners, fellows, and residents are more likely to be accepting of newer technological innovations. Adams said the anesthesiology community is tightly knit, which helps the company spread its message.
“It’s a pretty small community, meaning that our founders do socialize with a lot of the potential buyers, so I feel like a lot of hospitals that would be in a position to buy it know about it,” Adams said.
To market the product, the company is pursuing additional funding. Currently, sources from the larger Ann Arbor community and from the University have sponsored the product. Ann Arbor SPARK, an organization that supports new businesses and economic development, has taken an interest in the new product, as has the Ross School of Business, which finances the software through the Zell Lurie Commercialization Fund.
Adams said the AlertWatch team hopes to have spread their product across the marketplace within the next couple of years. To broaden the software’s applicability outside of the operating room, the team is currently working on creating an ICU version of the product, which would utilize the same methodology in a different setting.
“I think the goal is really to get out there and tell the story, show people what it does and just convince them that it will help them run a safer operating room,” Adams said.