Cleveland Clinic invests in remote monitoring of patients
CLEVELAND --A new Cleveland Clinic business venture means doctors will soon use technology to be able to monitor chronically ill patients remotely -- from watching blood pressure via telephone lines to one day keeping tabs on heart rhythms from a distance.
The trendsetting Clinic's business unit has teamed up with a Cleveland venture capital firm, Glengary LLC, a telemedicine doctor in New Hampshire and an information technology veteran in Massachusetts to form VitalStream Health Inc.
VitalStream is the latest company to come out of the Clinic's spin-off arm, CCF Innovations.
The system will be used to help gather enough health information from afar to generate online patient report cards that doctors will use to help treat people.
The idea belongs to Glengary and Dr. Dan Carlin, who founded the telemedicine practice WorldClinic in New London, N.H., in 1998.
Drawing from his experience as a medical officer in the Navy and as an expatriate volunteer, Carlin designed WorldClinic to be the "teledoctor" for patients who are far from modern medical care.
"My patients who are scattered around the world are getting older," Carlin said. "I needed a way to do a better job of taking care of them."
Larry Rosenfeld, a software developer and Glengary partner, has a personal connection.
"Dan was our telemedicine doctor when I sailed around the world in 2000, and when I took my kids to Antarctica," he said.
Rosenfeld said he and Carlin believed they needed "a strong institutional partner to make this thing work."
Steve Haynes' Glengary, which is allied with Baldwin-Wallace College in Berea, invests in early-stage companies, mostly in northeast Ohio.
Dr. Marc Penn, director of the Clinic's Bakken Heart-Brain Institute and medical director of its coronary intensive care unit, will be the lead clinical researcher on the project, Coburn said.
"They're going to be supplying the clinical knowledge and doing the studies," Rosenfeld said. "And we're going to be supplying the knowledge of the software world."
The partners are raising money and hiring the management team to run VitalStream Health, Rosenfeld said. Glengary also will invest in the startup.
Chris Coburn, executive director of CCF Innovations, said the idea has potential for growth.
"When you look at the elements of this team, you've got to feel that we've got a great opportunity for being a real leader in this emerging market of remote monitoring and management of patients," he said.
------
On the Net:
Glengary: http://www.glengaryllc.com/
CCF Innovations: http://www.clevelandclinic.org/innovations/
