Redox realizes at SXSW it’s grown up

Madison company Redox hit a milestone at this month’s South by Southwest conference in Austin.

Its three co-founders, all former Epic employees, realized it’s no longer a true early-stage company touting lofty goals and potential avenues. Instead, says co-founder Niko Skievaski, its pitch is now about how its customers are already improving health care.

“We’re not at a point anymore where we should be talking about potential and vision,” Skievaski said. “We’ve actually started executing on that vision.”

Redox, put simply, helps health care apps speak in the same language as health systems and their electronic medical records.

Most health systems have adopted EMRs, partly prodded by Affordable Care Act incentives that were a boon for EMR companies such as Verona-based Epic Systems. Though the records are all based on the same language, health systems can pick between Epic and its competitors’ versions. The health systems can also further modify their EMRs.

All of those different versions pose a difficulty to the myriad of startups that want to tap into the somewhat inconsistent EMR systems. That’s where Redox comes in. It serves as a central hub that can connect the roughly 300 app-makers on its site with health systems.

“We translate the different dialects into a standard,” Skievaski said.

App-makers can integrate with Redox, which in turn integrates them with health systems. Health systems, meanwhile, have an array of app options to choose from when they are looking for ways to improve care.

For Andrew Rubenstein, the section chief of obstetrics at New Jersey’s Hackensack University Medical Center, that means he and his staff are now able to track the amount of blood women are losing when getting a C-section.

Hackensack is using an FDA-approved tool from California-based Gauss Surgical, which asked Redox to help with the integration of its technology. Doctors have typically only had rough estimates of blood loss during procedures, as they’re generally done by weighing sponges that have several other bodily fluids mixed up.

Instead, Gauss lets nurses take photos of those sponges, and its technology then analyzes them to determine how much blood they have. That information is fed to the electronic medical records system, and nurses can begin reading the blood levels to doctors as another vital sign.

“It’s seamless. It’s real time. My nurses have embraced it,” Rubenstein said.

Redox, which has 16 employees and has raised $4 million, is now looking for health systems to begin picking from the apps it’s integrated with. Skievaski said that should pick up as health systems take a larger leap toward innovation to improve health care outcomes.

And just as its integrations are going live in more places, Redox is adding partnerships such as one announced last month with the global customer management software company Salesforce, which Skievaski said “definitely gives us credibility.”

Redox was knocked out during the semifinals of the main SWSW pitch competition this month. It lost against a startup that, like Redox did just a few months ago, talked about the company’s potential. But now Redox has a “very different mentality” and might stop doing pitch competitions altogether.

“We know what we need to do,” Skievaski said. “We just need to execute.”

— By Polo Rocha,
WisBusiness.com