If all goes as planned, Milwaukee health care software startup EmOpti Inc. will double its geographic reach to eight states by the end of the year.
The company, which uses technology to increase emergency room efficiency, in December raised $1.35 million of investor funding and surpassed 250,000 remote patient consultations, said Dr. Edward Barthell, chief executive officer. The funding will be used to ramp up marketing and sales.
Founded in 2014, EmOpti created a software platform that reduces patient wait times at emergency rooms and arranges completion of preliminary tests before the patient sees a doctor in person through remote telehealth conferencing. It has previously raised $5.5 million.
EmOpti continues to iterate on its product.
“We’re adding additional capabilities, including machine learning capabilities and predictive analytics, to complement our telehealth capabilities,” Barthell said.
Streaming real-time data is analyzed by its software to provide decision support to health care workers with the help of predictive analytics and remote clinical resources.
For example, if a patient comes in to the emergency room with a certain subset of conditions, EmOpti can predict whether that patient will need to be admitted to the hospital, and begin the process of finding an available bed so those patients aren’t stacking up in the ER, Barthell said.
EmOpti’s software is currently being used at four health systems in Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, North Carolina and Washington, D.C., and Barthell said another 10 systems are in the pipeline. He’s hoping four more systems will commit before year-end, which would help EmOpti expand to at least three more states.
“Health systems are like almost any population. There’s early adopters and then the middle tier and then there’s the slow adopters or the laggards,” Barthell said.
Among the early adopters, and an ongoing investor, was Milwaukee’s Aurora Health Care (now Advocate Aurora Health). The software is used at five Milwaukee-area Advocate Aurora Health hospitals, with three more coming on board in southeastern Wisconsin soon. Because of the health system’s recent merger and expansion into Illinois, EmOpti is also being deployed soon at two Chicago-area Advocate Aurora hospitals – its fifth state.
Where it has been implemented, EmOpti has reduced door to doc time, or the time between when patients arrive at the ER and when they are seen by a clinician, by 50 to 70%.
EmOpti Inc.
Leadership: Dr. Edward Barthell, chief executive officer
Headquarters: 250 N. Sunnyslope Road, #245, Brookfield
Website: emopti.com
What it Does: Emergency room efficiency platform
Founded: 2014
Employees: 11
Next goal: Launch in four more states in 2019.
Funding: Raised $1.35 million in December. Previously raised $5.5 million.
