Geneva Healthcare raises $1.8M for universal cardiac-monitor reader

Digital health companies are focusing on using new technologies to fix places in the health-care delivery system that are wasteful, inefficient, or slow.

Geneva Healthcare has found one of the slow spots: the emergency room. The San Diego-based company has raised a $1.83 million funding round from a group of angel investors. Geneva makes a software platform that imports data from the cardiac devices (like pacemakers or defibrillators) of lots of different manufacturers, and this can help speed up visits in the ER.

As anybody who’s ever visited an ER knows, its also one of the most expensive and slowest parts in our wildly inefficient delivery system.

Patients arrive at the ER all of the time with implanted devices, and they’re not easy to read. Each device produces data in a manufacturer-specific format that had to be read by a manufacturer’s representative onsite at the emergency room. During this time the doctors and the patients have to hang around waiting for the data to be interpreted.

The Geneva Healthcare platform software takes data from any device and delivers information on a universal dashboard that clinicians in the ER and elsewhere in the hospital can use.

An Academic Emergency Medicine Journal study found that the system cut the average ER wait time by 92 minutes per patient at the University of California at San Diego Emergency Department.

Geneva says it will use the money to market its system to more hospital systems in the U.S.

“Hospitals are seeing a great return on their investments with Geneva, and we need to get that message out even more aggressively,” said Geneva Healthcare CEO Kai Worrell in a statement. “This funding will allow us to advance the development of our software and to grow our sales force.”

Since its inception in 2011, Geneva Healthcare has focused on implementing the Geneva Healthcare Suite in key hospitals throughout Southern California, collecting data and measuring the value.

The company was founded in 2011 by a team of cardiologists and user experience designers.