Mobilizer Inc: Helping Hospital Patients

For medical patients, one of the best ways to reduce the time of hospital stays and also decrease the risk of complications such as blood clots and pressure ulcers is to simply get up and walk around. But some patients still have attached to their person, medical equipment, such as oxygen tanks or IV drips.   It can take hospital staff and nurses upwards of 20 minutes to prepare a patient for ambulation.  This adds up to hundreds of hours of wasted time each week.

Mobilizer Inc., is a graduate of the ZeroTo510 medical device startup accelerator and they have created a six-wheeled holster for all of the most common medical equipment, in order to make medical ambulation an easier and faster process. The carrier sits next to the patient’s bed so that only one attendant, is needed to unplug it from the wall, release the brakes, and start the patient moving around.

Mobilizer, which launched back in May, has now raised $300,000 in funding from Innova Memphis and MB Venture Partners and now has plans to close another $400,000 in the coming year. CEO and co-founder James Bell said that so far the Vanderbilt University Medical Center and Mass General Hospital and have purchased units, which cost a little under $5,000 each. The company has sold almost 100 units to date.  The increase of medical startups like Mobilizer offers a very useful recompense, the possibility of finding ways to reduce the economic and human resource burdens on the hospital system.

Although medical tech companies often struggle to get FDA approval before marketing, Mobilizer is a class 1 exempt service, which means the clearance process requires proving a certain level of quality and paying a fee to register with the FDA.  Bell said the plan is to create platforms for different hospital departments, tailoring the Mobilizers to their changing equipment requirements. Outside of the hospital, it will be easy to scale into home care as well. And currently Mobilizer is looking to form some partnerships with other medical tech companies.  “We are establishing relationships with other companies, for example with a portable ventilator company that mounts right on the Mobilizers really easily,” Bell said.

[Image via:beekays]

SOURCE: http://techcrunch.com/2013/08/31/because-walking-saves-lives-mobilizer-inc-is-a-start-up-thats-aiming-to-get-hospital-patients-moving/