Disease management poised to become a multibillion dollar online industry

Health Networking News
July 12, 2000

Excerpt on Cybernet Medical:

... In addition, the medical division of Cybernet Systems, a $10 million R&D firm in Ann Arbor, MI, is commercializing Web-based patient-monitoring and data-collection devices it helped develop for NASA, the National Institutes of Health, and the Department of Defense. Rather than marketing this technology themselves, Cybernet is partnering with firms that already have a foothold in certain sectors of the disease management market.

"Many of these companies have done this for a long time but have not taken their products onto the Internet platform," said Greg Emery, senior Vice President of Cybernet. "We are looking to license our technology and help people build patient-monitoring devices that can be worn continuously and are smart enough to recognize when a significant event occurs and place some priority on that."

At the heart of this strategy is Cybernet's new patent (U.S. #6,050,940), which covers the use of the Internet and wireless connectivity for portable instruments that measure physiologic data such as EEGs, EKGs, and blood pressure and pulse oximeters. The patent also covers the remote acquisition and transmission of medical data across the Internet for processing and relaying to medical practitioners for review and diagnosis. The company sees this property as a platform for moving specific aspects of (disease management) onto the Internet and designing networks that can move patient data as quickly as possible.

"We are building a service that we can operate or license to others to operate that gives our customers the infrastructure to collect and display the data via the Internet," Emery said. "This means the physician can go home and check the most recent patient activity, or even archived activity, using a standard browser-based system." ...