Medical-technology firms finding support in R.I.

Nalari Health LLC, of Providence, is trying to bring online health care to life. At the heart of online health care is the idea that the doctor can see you now, anytime, anywhere. The foundation of Nalari’s ability to deliver the best online care assistance is based upon using technology to bring patients and providers together for live encounters. For example, a nurse could examine a patient at their home while receiving instructions from their doctor on the computer, eliminating travel time, multiple visits and even needless ambulance calls.
“We are trying to change the location and the timeliness of care,” said Mark P. Treat, president of the company.
The company is one of many promising Rhode Island medical-technology businesses, according to Thorne Sparkman, managing director of the Slater Technology Fund, a state-backed, venture-capital fund that provides seed funding to qualified entrepreneurs.
“There are about 15 [medical] companies in the industry that we are assisting and there has to be at least another 15 just working on electronic medical records,” said Sparkman.
Hoping to spread the word on the sector’s potential, Sparkman organized a July 12 event for networking in Providence attended by a host of companies, including Nalari.
The company has not received any funding from Slater but did get a $10,000 Governor’s Workforce Board training grant.
Treat and a staff of eight have been working on the company’s project for the last 18 months. Another dozen employees serve as part-time support. “We hope to be significantly further along in the process by the end of the year,” he said.
Treat’s vision includes a patient having a teleconference with a hospital’s emergency room for triage, prescriptions and other care, such as “tele-referrals” with other doctors.
The system is also suited for chronic illnesses such as those that might require visiting nurses or periodic care. In essence, it’s a house call by computer, and all the information can be entered into the patient’s medical records.
Treat believes the medical field is on the verge of a technological windfall. Rhode Island, he says, is uniquely positioned to excel.
He credits the relative ease in which Rhode Island gets reimbursed by the federal government for Medicare and Medicaid. “When you are doing something new and innovative and want to measure if it improves health and can reduce cost and improve access to care, you can do it in Rhode Island without a painful approval process. That makes everything easier to evaluate,” he said. Jason D. Harry, founder and CEO of Lucidux in Providence, said the state’s support system for budding entrepreneurs has been invaluable.
For the last year the company has been working on developing improved imaging for minimally invasive surgeries involving remote cameras. The goal is to devise a precise computer-screen image in three dimensions of the surgical area in order to improve medical procedures. With additional refinement the technology can be used for advanced-disease-detection techniques. Over the last several years Lucidux has received grants from R.I. Science and Technology Advisory Council, a Small Business Innovation Research Phase I award and funding from the Rhode Island Business Plan competition. Slater has not contributed funding to the company.
“The STAC grant was absolutely key to the early development of the company, as well as collaborating with Brown University and Rhode Island Hospital,” he said.
But there is more to a growing business than product development. “One of the things we need to do as a business is to begin exposing the technology to potential strategic partners, large companies that are already in the market,” he said. That will help ease the pathway and the costs of getting a new product into the marketplace, something he hopes to make significant progress on over the next six months.
Marshall S. Votta, of Leverage Health Solutions, in New York, says Rhode Island is well-positioned to capitalize on the growth of the medical-technology industry. Leverage acts as a contact agent between companies, offering help with operational savings, efficiency and revenue generation. “I look at Rhode Island as having a great opportunity,” he said. “There are [medical] centers of excellence, Brown University, some hospital systems that are very well-regarded, and that’s been true for a long time,” he said. “We’re seeing that there is a growing need for health-information technology to transform the way we as a country deal with health care.” The difference now, he said, is that there are incentives for providers to adopt that technology.
“It’s going to be the innovators in the field who really change the way health care is delivered,” said Jennifer O’Shea, a public-communications specialist for Nalari Health. “Health care is broken and now is the time” to fix it. •

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