https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ThZ0AoKGShY
Health IT company VitalMedicals has developed a way to use smart glasses to save surgeons time in the operating room has raised roughly $1 million to grow its technical team and expand its technical implementations beyond its first two pilot sites in California — El Camino Hospital in Mountain View and the Palo Alto Veterans Association Hospital.
The company is part of Stanford University’s latest StartX accelerator class, which is holding its demo day today.
It currently has three products across smartphones and smart glasses. VitalVideo streams live ultrasound, fluoroscopy,and endoscopy video to smart glasses and tablets during procedures. The idea is to bring the data to the surgeon’s field of vision, rather than the surgeon constantly needing to walk closer towards a screen to get a better look, and requiring more time to re-focus. VitalCom provides a way for clinicians to chat with anyone else in the hospital through a voice command to their smart glasses or smartphones and share their point of view through the smart glasses’ camera. VitalStream gives a constant view of the patient’s vital signs.
Cardiovascular and cardiothoracic surgery are its primary use cases for the pilots taking place in Palo Alto and Mountain View. But it is also looking to expand into masculofacial and neonatal surgeries based on feedback it’s received.
In a phone interview with MedCity News, CEO and co-founder Ash Eldritch said the company plans to increase the number of pilots to 10 by the end of March and double staff size to six. He distinguished VitalMedicals’ approach from other startups that are working with smart glasses such as Pristine and Augmedix.
“It is really about situational awareness. There are many bits of information that surgeons are expected to draw upon during a procedure,” such as scans, images, and vital signs. “Because surgeons are so focused, if they have to walk away from the patient for 20 seconds to look at an image, they lose valuable time.”
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
If VitalMedicals is able to trim the time these complex procedures take, it can reduce the risk of complications and make a difference in the length of the patient’s recovery time .
