by JL Reid

Doctor Vincent Carrasco tells a frightening, though rhetorical story about a hospital that misplaces important medical equipment. He asks you to imagine you’re admitted to that hospital. Although you’re not facing imminent death, your condition is serious enough to warrant an in-patient visit.

While you’re lying in bed, waiting for the doctor on-call to stop by your room, you hear a nurse make an overhead page, “Does anyone know the location of an available EKG machine? If you do please call the fourth floor nurse station.”

As Carrasco tells this story he leans forward. He’s looking at you over his glasses. His hands, with their fingertips touching at a peak, hover between his chest and the table. With a dramatic pause he emphasizes the few minutes of hectic silence, now happening in his story. He continues: people rush back and forth in front of your open door. Then the nurse pages again, double-checking in case someone didn’t hear her the first time.

As Carrasco tells his story, Steve Jackson and Bobby Bahram who are sitting at the table, nod in agreement. Occasionally they chime in, emphasizing details of Carrascos’s narrative. Then Jackson looks over at you and says he hopes you’re not anticipating a hospital stay any time soon, but in that event you’d be smart to avoid the hospital just described. Unfortunately, as Carrasco candidly assures, most hospitals fit the description.

The reason Carrasco, a veteran pediatric surgeon, is telling you this story is to impress upon you a major problem plaguing hospitals today. He, Jackson, and Bahram hope that their new company, RadarFind, will solve not only that ailment but will positively impact the medical costs and level of treatment everyone experiences.

RadarFind is integrating technologies, which include RFID, relational databases, and their own intellectual property, into a package that helps hospitals manage their assets. Though at its core the company is a technology provider, its co-founders seem to shy away from spotlighting the technology itself. “Are we using radio frequency identification technology? Yes,” says Jackson. “Are we doing it in a way that anyone has ever seen before? No, Not really. Is it only RFID? No. It’s a combination of multiple technologies. RFID is just a part of it.”

Rather than just tackle a particular industry’s technological needs, RadarFind is more interested in tackling an inefficient process. Carrasco, Jackson, and Bahram believe that purchasing inefficiencies lead hospitals to overcapitalize. The increased spending places inordinate pressure on physicians to quickly move patients out of beds, which ultimately impairs the level of treatment patients receive. RadarFind’s solution to this problem is simple. They want to tag expensive, mobile medical equipment with RFID transmitters that maintain contact with an inventory database. If a hospital just knew what medical equipment it had, and where it had it, it wouldn’t buy multiple pieces of equipment that go unused. The lower overhead alleviates certain financial pressures, which benefits both physicians and patients.

RadarFind sprung to life near the end of 2003, when Carrasco, Bahram, and Jackson started brainstorming potential markets for their startup. “A lot of what we’ve been focused on the past six months,” says Bahram, “has been really detailed, thorough due diligence, customer validation, and needs analysis of what I call deep unresolved needs.” By April of this year the three of them had determined what that unresolved need was. Next they prepared a business case to submit to NCSU’s 11th Annual College of Management $10K Business Plan Competition. RadarFind took top prize in the competition, and since winning the company has been transitioning out of stealth mode.

Read the full article on RadarFind in the July issue of the TechJournal. Not a subscriber yet, if you are a technology business decision maker in North Carolina, get your free subscription here:

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