eMerge Health Solutions (@emergehealth), developer of intra-operative endoscopic workflow systems that enable physicians and nurses to fully document endoscopic procedures in real-time, has raised $850K from investors led by CincyTech.
The technology was developed out of a collaboration by Drs. Alan Safdi, Michael Safdi, Pradeep Bekal and Dan Walker of the Ohio GI & Liver Institute, and Barhat Sinai, a former GE Aviation technology manager.
“Our vision is to be the industry leader for hands-free documentation and workflow solutions for the entire healthcare industry,” stated Trent McCracken, president and CEO of eMerge Health. “The funds raised will be used for ongoing research and development to broaden our voice capabilities, and to expand the sales and implementation teams”.
“eMerge is significantly different from its competitors in terms of its automated reporting and documentation features,” said Venerable. “Now, with its solid leadership, it is tracking to triple revenue and headcount by the end of the year.”
eMerge’s software suite offers a truly comprehensive endoscopic data capture system, from the pre-hospital setting to the collaborative documentation in real-time during the procedure by both the physician and the nurses.
The eMerge Patient Portal allows patients to easily complete all pre-op information, which expedites pre-op nursing care and decreases the time patients must wait prior to their procedures. The patient portal also provides post-op access to care instructions and medical status through a secure, web-based portal.
The eMerge Nursing portal is capable of importing pre-op nursing data from numerous EMR products such as AllScripts, EPIC and Cerner using a standard HL7 interface. During the procedure it enables auto-import of data captured by numerous vital signs monitors, auto-generates pathology requisition and specimen labels, and delivers accurate billing and charges generated via “Action” commands at the point of care in real-time. The technology is also smart enough to allow the physician, nurse, and patient to carry-on normal conversation without affecting intra-operative procedure and report documentation.
The eMerge Intra-Operative Notes feature enables physicians to create a detailed report using voice commands captured by the eMerge wireless headset. It also records images and video of the procedure and completes an intra-operative report which can then be sent to referring physicians and surgeons within seconds of completion.
Phil Huff, executive-in-residence at CincyTech, claims the total addressable market for this hands-free documentation technology across all specialties is between $500-700 million. So far the eMerge solution is being used at three ambulatory surgery centers and Jewish Hospital in Cincinnati. It seems obvious that the next step for eMerge is to bring their products to iPads and other tablet devices as either a native application, or a web-based HTML5 version of their current web-portal.
