An on-call cardiologist sits in his Marin County home late at night, and gets a call from a San Francisco hospital. A trauma patient just came in, and the doctors want to know if they should crack the patient’s chest. The cardiologist has two choices: to make a blind judgement call over the telephone or rush to the hospital, costing the patient invaluable minutes.
This true and universal scenario provided a key impetus in the development of Thousand Oaks-based Intracom Corp., a hybrid Internet and medical technology company.
After starting with a business plan jotted on a napkin and four years of technically complex R & D;, Intracom has unveiled its flagship product. Called MedEcho, the technology transmits full-motion, real-time, diagnostic-quality ultrasound images over the Internet and other digital networks.
Now the cardiologist in the above scenario could have an ultrasound zapped to his home for instant review.
“We’re filling a void,” said Fritz Braunberger, Intracom chief executive and co-founder. “We intend to have MedEcho become the standard for the transportation of live images, which hasn’t really existed before.”
The use of comparatively inexpensive and noninvasive ultrasound imaging has risen exponentially over the last several years, suggesting that MedEcho’s potential market is sizeable. So far, 30 health care facilities use a beta-test version of MedEcho, including the Children’s Hospital in Hollywood and the hospitals at UC Irvine and UC San Diego. The transmitter/receiver system received Food & Drug Administration approval last year.
Intracom is led in its development by a doctor-intensive board of advisers and co-founder Dr. James Calonge. Possible competition may later emerge from ultrasound machinery manufacturers such as Hewlett-Packard, but according to Braunberger, Intracom has entered discussions with HP and other ultrasound makers about strategic partnerships.
Don’t pigeonhole Intracom as a biotech company, however. It is just as much an Internet company; in fact the company’s management team and its financial underwriters primarily categorize it as such.
Intracom is developing what it hopes will be the sine qua non in online health care professional tools, dubbed MedDesk. The service, to be rolled out over the next several months, will include online record transcription, a medical reference-geared Web search engine, and online training so that doctors can earn continuing education credits over the Web.
“We want to offer online services to physicians well beyond what is currently available,” Braunberger said. “Standards in the medical industry are hard to uproot, and certainly some (medical) specialties are more receptive to this kind of technology than others, but we have the ability to make a real difference here.”
Like most Web startups, the company is in an ongoing search for private funding, and is preparing for an initial public offering by midyear.
Flurry of Deals
BizBuyer.com, the Santa Monica-based Internet company that runs a business-to-business marketplace for services and products, had a fast and furious February that left it a much stronger company than it was before.
Staples.com, the online branch of the Staples store, made a 10 percent investment in the company and announced a cross-promotion deal. Next came the news that Entrepre-neur.com, the small-business news site owned by the publisher of Entrepreneur magazine, will integrate BizBuyer’s system onto its site and thus drive substantial traffic to it.
Lastly, the company forged an agreement with online telecommunications marketplace eSpoke.com to expand the breadth of telecom service available to BizBuyer users. No financial details were made available for the deals.
“What we’re seeing is momentum,” said General Manager Paolo Consiglio. “The more deals, the more buzz. The more buzz, the more calls. The more calls, the more deals.” According to Consiglio, more significant deals are on the horizon for BizBuyer.
News & Notes
Two of L.A.’s Internet entertainment companies are going global. Jumping from the Internet to the radio, Santa Monica-based Launch Media has entered a partnership with CNNRadio International. Affiliate stations will carry Launch’s music and entertainment news in Europe, the Middle East and Africa. Meanwhile, Hollywood.com, also in Santa Monica, has entered the Brazilian market with Br.hollywood.com. The movie-news-centric site is in Portuguese, and is prominently featured on AOL Latin America. Hollywood.com is gearing up to launch similar versions for Argentina and Mexico.
Westlake Village-based SDR Technologies has been acquired by National Information Consortium in a stock deal worth $134 million. SDR develops online tools for electronic government services. NIC, in Overland Park, Kan., designs and operates Internet-based portals that allow businesses and citizens to access government information and complete transactions online.
Contributing columnist Sara Fisher can be reached via email at [email protected].
