Aurora expanding ER technology

Aurora Health Care said Wednesday it will add technology developed by Brookfield start-up EmOpti Inc. to the emergency rooms at two more of its hospitals.

The technology is designed to reduce emergency room wait times and leads to patients being treated more quickly. The technology, which the health care provider tested at Aurora Sinai Medical Center in early 2016, reduced emergency room initial wait times by 75%, said Mike Rodgers, director of strategic innovation at Aurora.

Aurora now will expand EmOpti’s technology to its medical centers in West Allis and Kenosha, Rodgers said. Aurora also is planning to use it in select urgent care clinics, he said.

The technology was tested by Aurora and MedStar, a 10-hospital system in the Baltimore/Washington, D.C., area, said Ed Barthell, EmOpti's founder and chief executive officer.

“Aurora is the local validation of the genius of this idea; Medstar is the second,” said Tim Keane, manager of Golden Angels Investors LLC, which has invested in EmOpti.

Both Aurora and MedStar had “fantastic” experiences with EmOpti’s technology, a reaction that is rare for a product’s initial testing, Keane said.

“They haven’t had any of the hiccups you would get in a normal beta cycle,” he said.

The way EmOpti's technology works, patients entering the emergency room meet immediately with a triage nurse, a common procedure. But as the nurse takes the patient’s vital signs, he or she makes a request via computer for a consultation. An offsite doctor in a remote location accepts the request and appears on a computer tablet in front of the nurse and the patient.

Anywhere from 65% to 75% of people coming into emergency rooms have non-critical problems, said Barthell, an emergency room doctor turned entrepreneur. Having a doctor involved right away speeds up the process because, unlike a triage nurse, a doctor can order tests and treatments, he said.

"Instead of two hours in the waiting room, they swing a tablet in front of you at the nurse's desk, and you're talking to the doctor," he said.

The doctors work from a "command center" with as many as seven computer screens in front of them, Barthell said. Each of them can service three or four hospitals. So the health care organization can have one doctor at the command center rather than a doctor in each of those locations, he said.

EmOpti was founded by Barthell in 2015. Before that, he was with Caradigm, Microsoft and the National Institute for Medical Informatics. He also was an executive at Infinity HealthCare and founded EMSystems LLC, which was acquired by Florida-based Intermedix Corp. in 2010 for an undisclosed price.

EmOpti has 10 employees and is marketing its technology to emergency medicine departments and urgent care clinics, Barthell said. The marketing effort will be helped by the results of Aurora and MedStar's tests, he said.

"Patients love it," he said. "Everybody hates to wait."