Diagnostics, Health IT, Hospitals, Startups

Diagnostics company gives employers a “before and after” system for workplace injury claims

Treating workplace injuries can add up for employers, but Emerge Diagnostics could help lower these costs […]

Treating workplace injuries can add up for employers, but Emerge Diagnostics could help lower these costs significantly, if all goes to plan.

Emerge Diagnostics is developing a series of before-and-after medical tests to help an employer determine the extent of a worker’s injury, compared to their previous state of health.

This, in turn, could ostensibly help clarify claims requests and improve employee healthcare, CEO Robert Thompson said.

The cost of workplace injuries is no joke – a UC Davis researcher estimated the annual cost of such injuries and illnesses nationally is $250 billion. Of course, EmergeDx is only after the soft-tissue injury slice of this pie, but it’s a prevailing concern for employers with tight bottom lines. The company started with warehousing, trucking and healthcare employers – businesses that often require heavy lifting and constant muscle strain. Among its customers, Emerge Diagnostics sees an average cost per claim of $15,000, just to treat injuries like sprains and strains.

Emerge Diagnostics starts out with a baseline employee health assessment, so that when a work-related injury is reported, the company performs a post-injury assessment of the worker. EmergeDx’s Electrodiagnostic Functional Assessment (EFA) evaluates a patient’s condition in real time, using tests like EMG (electromyography), range of motion testing and functional capacity evaluations.

The company can determine whether a patient is “trying,” Thompson said, allowing employers to figure out more easily who’s bluffing and who’s seriously injured. Gotta wonder what implications this technology has for the litigious, cry-me-a-lawsuit types…

Quite a lot, Thompson said. In the company’s pilot run in Tulsa, he said that once workers were pretested for musculature conditions, the number of workers comp claims dropped dramatically at every single customer site.

The company last year received 510(k) clearance for its EFA device, which costs less than $20,000, Thompson said. Emerge Diagnostics isn’t selling the device directly to employers, however, but contracting out services as well as placing the devices in occupational health clinics near the employers.

Other implications for the technology include presurgical motion testing to gauge whether surgical hardware should or should not be removed from a patient.

The 2-year-old San Diego-area company just completed a $750,000 funding round, largely from qualified individuals, CEO Robert Thompson said. It has raised about $3 million in friends-and-family funding since its 2012 launch. Emerge Diagnostics plans to use the new funding to expand its presence nationally.

EmergeDx’s technology tracks back further than two years; its backers purchased another company, IDI Diagnostics, in a stock-for-stock transaction. EmergeDx acquired IDI’s assets and employees, and shifted to the greater San Diego region last year.

[Image from flickr user Mark Hunter]

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