University of Michigan start-up AlertWatch raises $1m from a range of backers.
AlertWatch, a Michigan-based start-up, has announced that it has raised $1m from Michigan Economic Development Corporation, Ann Arbor SPARK, and angel backers.
The University of Michigan spinoff aims to display medical data to doctors in an easy-to-read manner, with the intention of raising patient safety.
The monitor is designed to amalgamate information from 204 different sources, and then display it on an animated human body that flashes up in different colours depending on the potential severity of a problem it has detected.
AlertWatch, currently based at Michigan’s Venture Accelerator, has applied for approval to the Food and Drug Administration for its operating room software. If granted this summer, the firm plans to start selling the programme as a subscription to hospitals around the US.
AlertWatch founder Dr Kevin Tremper said: “The good news is that to begin with we don’t kill very many people. The odds of a major problem in the operating room are relatively low. The airline industry was in the same boat before they digitized. The commercial crash rate was at about one in a million and now they’re less than one in 25 million. Right now we’re at about one in 200,000 that’s an anesthetic related disaster, we’d like to get that closer to 1 in a million.”
