Adam Torres and Anthony Shao discuss Octane’s Medical Innovation Forum.
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Show Notes:
Listen to Octane’s Medical Innovation Forum coverage. In this episode, Adam Torres interviews Anthony Shao, Co-Founder & CEO at Darroch Medical Solutions, explore Darroch Medical Solutions and Octane’s Medical Innovation Forum.
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About Anthony Shao
Anthony is the CEO of Darroch Medical Solutions. He developed the Beat Analytics System: a real-time remote patient monitoring system capable of aggregating and presenting various medical device data with low latency in order to help supplement nurse intuition and knowledge, enhance patient outcomes, and reduce the incidence of hospital-based adverse events.
Anthony graduated from the University of San Diego in 2018 with a double major in Electrical Engineering and Finance and was also the Valedictorian of the Shiley-Marcos School of Engineering.
About Darroch Medical Solutions
Darroch Medical Solutions, Inc. is a HealthTech company with a mission to transform patient care through continuous health status monitoring and AI-driven prognostic adverse event prevention. Its primary product, called the Beat Analytics System, improves patient outcomes by equipping practitioners with real time medical device data and novel insights derived from its machine intelligence engines which enables individualized patient care and the anticipation of adverse events previously thought to be unpreventable.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d like to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to MissionMatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right. So today I’m with Anthony Hsiao, and I’m at the Medical Innovation Forum in Irvine, California, and we’re having all kinds of fun.
Anthony, first off, welcome to the show. Appreciate it, man. Thanks for having me. All right. So what brings you out here today? What brings you to the conference? Yeah, so I got invited by Octane to talk about our company, Durock Medical. Pitched to a couple of angels and other interested folks that are out there.
Yeah, so did you already kind of talk about it or did, were you on stage or you were in sessions or? Yeah, yeah, so I had the opportunity to pitch our company. A couple hours ago. How’d it go, man? Come on. You gotta give me the, give me the, I wasn’t here doing interviews. You gotta tell me. How’d it go? Yeah, it was, it was good.
It was good. You know, I think there’s always a learning curve when you’re pitching in front on, on stage when you got the, the teleprompter and all the big lights on you. That was definitely an experience in and of itself, but you gotta start somewhere. For sure. For the audience, obviously, that couldn’t be there, like what were some of the key takeaways?
Yeah. You know, I think I’ll just first start talk a little bit about what we do. Please. If that makes sense. So we’re developing a remote monitoring platform that alerts nurses to certain adverse event precursors so that they can intervene at the right time so the patient doesn’t decline, have an issue, et cetera.
In terms of takeaways though, you know, I think the main thing is, is there’s, there’s still plenty of money that’s, that’s coming along for seed funding. It’s really about finding the right investor who understands the, the space the time that you’re in and kind of understands the longterm goals of your actual.
Company. So that’s always something that’s, that’s challenging to get down in 10 minutes, but you know, it’s, it’s, it’s one of those things you just got to learn and you got to do how the idea for the company come about. Like, where’d that start? Yeah, that’s a great question. So my team and I were pretty much predominantly engineers.
We graduated from the university of San Diego. It’s a little shout out. And this was our senior project. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So this, this, this idea has come from, you know, the smallest University Form of an idea. Interesting. So the original project we got pitched from the school of nursing, I don’t want to bash the engineering school, but they were like, yeah, this doesn’t actually meet the requirements.
So you got to figure something else out. And so we went to the school of nursing and they’re like, Hey, we have, we have no way of knowing what happens in a patient’s room unless we go in. And that’s really frustrating when we got three, four, five, six patients. Right. And so we start off our initial idea with, let’s just present information from an infusion pump on a phone.
Right. And then once we graduated, we were like, why would you stop there? You know, there’s so much information from Vital Signs Monitor that once we got one of those integrated, then we were like, well, if we integrated a hospital bed, now you got the kind of Holy Trinity of the most common medical instruments, and there’s so much data that’s inside each one of them, but how much of that’s really being aggregated today, especially, you know, faster than every couple of hours, right?
Very, very little. That’s kind of the inception of our, of our company. And we’ve been just kind of rolling with it ever since. Man. So at what point did you know, like, this was not going to just be like a, A college project. And you’re like, wait a minute, this is like something we’re actually going to spend time on.
We’re like, we’re going to, when did that happen? I’m curious. You know, I think it comes a lot with probably right. Don’t tell me like two hours ago when you’re,
I appreciate the question. I think it had to, it came in the form of. Once we started to understand like what really were the adverse events we were trying to target, right? Yeah. We had stuff that was very simple, like a patient procedures, the wrong drug. A nurse comes in later because they, they hear the alarms for going from like a vital signs.
And it’s like, you know, all these different vital signs have have gone down. This patient’s like decompensated, we gotta do something. And I was like, that is, that is a, excuse me, that’s a dumb problem to have. Yeah. Especially in 2020 you know, back then 2018. Mm-Hmm. Right. And we were thinking like, well, if you were to present this information to prevent that from happening.
And then once we started to get a critical mass and luckily again, USDA has a school of nursing and we were able to talk with a lot of those nurses who were there, who were either practicing or were about to practice and understand like, Hey, if we were to provide you this information, just from this, these one or two medical devices, what would be the benefit of that?
Right. And they, we got some really great feedback from them. And then kind of before we even integrated the last. Medical instrument, which was that bed people were like, if you can tell me when a patient’s going to get out of bed, that’s that’s it. That’s that’s the 1 thing we’ve been looking for, because so many patients, they recover from surgery.
They’re like, I need to go to the bathroom and it’s at night. They don’t really have a great way of like talking to the nurses. And so they smack that button. But no one comes, right? So yeah, we’ve all been in the bed at night. You want to go to the bathroom, but you don’t want to get out of bed. So you kind of toss and turn.
But you know, for some of these patients, they’re so weak, they try to get out of bed. It’s so dangerous. And once we were able to kind of validate our technology and say, I think we can actually tell people 15 to 20 minutes ahead of time that this patient’s thinking about getting it, but not not that the patient’s out of bed.
They’re thinking about getting it. Wow. That like completely revolutionizes how, you know, how health care might be given to some of these people. And that’s exactly what we wanted to do. And they was kind of like the stories of, Hey, we’re developing this technology. We understand this is a pain point. What do you think?
And when those people would give us that positive response, it’s like, Okay, well, if we can save one life, two lives, three lives, like that makes us worth it. Right. And I understand there’s a whole fiscal part of it in the, in all the economics, but you know, at its very core, what we’re trying to do is save lives.
Right. And that’s, that’s, I think that’s a you know, an eager of an opportunity for anybody to pursue. Yeah. So talk to me about where you’re at, like exactly today, like with the product, the iteration, like the rollout, like just where you’re at with for sure. So we finished the development of our system.
We can integrate with kind of the three most common families of those medical instruments, infusion pumps, file science and hospital beds. We can take that information and essentially with less than a 10 second delay, present all of it. Automobile application. So that’s done kind of moving towards the regulatory side.
We, we’ve made some really strong progress. So we submitted 2 pre submissions. They’ve both been reviewed a lot of the questions that we tend to get from VCs or angels. We can kind of immediately point to those pre submissions and say, Hey, we’ve talked to FDA. We know kind of what the thought process is.
And how we can kind of address future issues, right? Yeah. Like I said, really far along the process. We’re looking to submit a 510 K and Q3 of next year, man. We’re talking with a few institutions to start pilot rollouts. I think it’s always interesting that when you talk to a lot of these institutions, people who are closer on the ground, the nurses, the kind of nursing directors, the physicians, they all understand how big of an issue this is.
But sometimes when you talk to people higher up there, there tends to be a little bit of a disconnect. So I’m trying to bring all the stakeholders together. That takes time. But you know, it’s, it’s really hard to deny how eager and how excited a lot of these nurses and a lot of these physicians get have like, Hey, you’re telling me I don’t need to physically go in the room and stare all these instruments and I can see a graph.
I can see kind of all the trends that have been developing over time. So that’s, that’s, that’s where we are. Amazing. And so what, what’s the next step for you? Obviously you were just on stage earlier today. So now what happens after the conference? What’s next for you? I mean, it’s back to business. We want to secure that pilot.
We’re talking, like I said, with a few institutions. Ideally, we stay in Southern California. That’s the easiest way to be. Fundraising is always a, you know, as every CEO will tell you, they say when you’re fundraising, it’s a hundred percent of your mind. And when you’re not, it’s 50 percent of your mind.
So we are actively fundraising to get us past the FDA. Now, I think. We’re in a great position because we’ve done so much of that internal work, and we, since this is kind of our, our, our baby, you know, we’ve done so much of that regulatory work in house, we’ve done a lot of that development work in house, and now it’s time to push that towards the FDA, and we, since we have such great foundation, pushing ourselves into getting those pilots and then to the FDA process is that’s our immediate goal.
Amazing. Final question. If somebody is watching this at home and they want to follow up or they want to learn more about the company, how do they do that? Yep. You can visit us at www. durockmedical. com. You can always reach out to me at anthonyshow at durockmedical. com. I’m sure there’s plenty of information with what we’ll be releasing with some of our early algorithms that we’ve developed and that we’re looking to, you know, use some of that positive case studies that we gather from our initial pilot locations to put a white paper out because I think a lot of people are really interested and they, they hear like, oh, you can prevent these things, but let me see the data, right?
Let me see X, Y, and Z. And that’s why we’re so interested in, like, starting these pilot institutions and moving forward because we absolutely want to present that to people so that they can develop their own models. Right? You know, this is this is a collaborative effort upon a bunch of different people.
And so I’d say, you know, you’ll probably see a lot of us in the coming months of what we’re able to do with our data. How we’re able to present that data to other people. So I I’d say it’s kind of just a mixture of all those amazing. Well, for everybody at home, just so you know, we’re going to put the links to the website and the show notes.
So you can just click on it and head right on over. And speaking to the audience, if this is your first time with mission matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe or that follow button. This is a daily show each and every day. We’re bringing you new content, new thought leaders, and hopefully new inspiration to help you along the way on your journey as well.
So again, Hit that subscribe or follow button and Anthony, again, thank you so much for coming on. Thanks for having me, man.