Business 2.0 - Magazine Article - Printable Version - The $50 Million Giveaway: "$8M HOME PATIENT MONITORING
WHO: David Aslin and Paul Badawi, 3i, Menlo Park, Calif.
WHO THEY ARE: Aslin is a partner in 3i's West Coast office. Badawi, a former genetic researcher for the National Institutes of Health, joined 3i last year as an entrepreneurial fellow. 3i invests $1.6 billion a year in buyouts and venture deals, the majority in health care and IT.
WHAT THEY WANT: A wireless home-monitoring network for recuperating hospital patients.
WHY IT'S SMART: No one likes extended hospital stays. Not patients, not hospitals, and not insurance companies paying bills that can exceed $5,000 a day. For the critically ill, there's no way around lengthy visits. But thousands of other patients could be sent home early if they could be monitored at home or at a lower-cost facility. Badawi and Aslin envision a wireless transmitter that would attach to existing hardware such as portable ECG machines and heart-rate and blood-pressure monitors. The device would send data through a wireless router to a cluster of back-office servers. The servers would function like a call center, routing a patient's vital signs to the right nursing station or on-call physician. Trimming just two days off the typical 10-day hospital stay for stroke victims would be a service worth $2.7 billion.
WHAT HE WANTS FROM YOU: Between you and a partner, you'll need expertise in medical device technology and database management to get a working demo ready to pitch to HMOs or insurance companies. Half a million dollars in seed money should be sufficient to get that far. 'It's not the technology, it's the complexity of navigating the health-care system that's going to be difficult,' Badawi says. If you can sign up an HMO to test the system, 3i promises $7.5 million more to bring it to market.
SEND YOUR PLAN TO: [email protected]"
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