from Hacker News

Medisas (YC W13), A Company That Saves People's Lives

by jakek on 4/24/14, 4:42 PM with 14 comments

• by hga on 4/24/14, 5:36 PM

  How can doing this in purely in "the cloud", "the web", possibly be a good idea?

  Yes, there's a real problem this is solving ... until a shift change happens at the same time the hospital's Internet connection is down. Surely you could put a small, generic machine or two running your own software on the hospital's net that does the local work, or takes over if the Internet connection is down, etc.

  Or do you depend on cell phone tech as a backup for the hospitals? In that case, the infrastructure at your end had best have some serious redundancy ... which is fortunately fairly easy and not that expensive to arrange nowadays.

  Why I'm obsessing on this detail, besides normally rock solid AT&T have a long outage that might have covered our entire town or more yesterday? I live in tornado country, and know how easily services can get knocked out by weather of all sorts. Here's an extreme case I avoided by luck and preparation: http://stormdoctor.blogspot.com/2011/06/first-response-mode-...

• by freehunter on 4/24/14, 5:37 PM

  As a Midwesterner, when I hear about medical tech companies saving people's lives, I immediately think of Epic based out of Madison WI. Is Medisas going to be going toe-to-toe with Epic? Epic is one of the very few Midwestern companies that I can liken to what I hear about the silicon valley mindset: Don't hire anyone over 30, don't ask about work/life balance, and you can't have the day off because we're saving lives, dammit!

  It's really weird knowing and hearing about companies and products you never knowingly interact with.

• by samstave on 4/24/14, 6:30 PM

  We built a similar service in 2009 and applied to YC with it... but it was HL7 agnostic and ran an appliance in the hospital connecting to various EMRs and other components...

  We were too early - this was on the first iphone and touch (pre-ipad)

  We were bloked by the big EMRs and various other "too-early" nay-sayers (the average age of a nurse is quite high, and at the time - they thought there was no way they coud interact with a screen as small as an iphone)

  Here's to hoping that medesis can succeed, and that this ideas time has come....

• by wehadfun on 4/24/14, 7:58 PM

  This is a management problem first. A technical problem second. There are plenty of companies that run 24/7/365 that have people taking over others task without making the amount of mistakes found in the medical profession.