VitalMedicals, a San Francisco-based company developing smart software platform for surgical teams and hospitals, to improve operational efficiency and patient safety, has announced it has raised $925k in seed funding from professional angel investors and the Stanford-StartX Fund. The capital will allow the company to expand their technical team needed to continue building innovative smart glasses technologies for the hospital and beyond. Additionally, it will enable them to expand their pilot programs beyond their initial two providers: El Camino Hospital and the Palo Alto Veterans Association Hospital.
The company’s vision is to build technologies that will power the “smart hospital of the future” where clinicians will always access to critical information they need for the task at hand, intelligently delivered to their mobile device or smart glasses. By connecting clinicians to their data and their teams, hospitals will be able to streamline their clinical workflows and drive value-based quality care.
VitalMedicals Smart Glasses-Enabled Products
VitalMedicals currently offers three mobile- and smart glasses-enabled products for use in hospitals:
– VitalVideo streams live ultrasound, fluoroscopy,and endoscopy video to smart glasses and tablets during procedures, bringing that data right into a surgeon’s field of view to eliminate the need to reference screens that are too small or too far away, and keep the surgeon’s focus where it should be: on the patient.
– VitalCom enables clinicians to talk with anyone else in the hospital with just a voice command to their smart glasses or mobile device, as well as sharing their point of view via smart glasses’ front-facing camera. Inefficient communications technologies cost U.S. hospitals $8.3 billion annually, so hands-free communication and view sharing has huge benefit for hospitals’ very distributed teams needing collaboration and expert assistance.
– VitalStream streams live vital signs and alarms to the anesthesiologist or circulating nurse’s smart glasses or tablet during conscious sedation procedures to improve situational awareness. A study with Stanford University School of Medicine demonstrated significantly faster recognition of adverse patient events with VitalStream.
Although Google Glass failed in the consumer realm, the wearable has shown great promise in healthcare and other enterprises. Companies focused on creating healthcare-focused Google Glass solutions such as Augmedix, Pristine, CrowdOptic, and others have already gain traction with a growing number of provider pilots. Despite the recent Glass backlash, venture capital investments in Google Glass stratups could signal there are incredible opportunities on the horizon for Glass in healthcare.
