Gold Standard Diagnostics

Med-tech development effort paying off

Friday, 25 September 2009 00:00

A medical diagnostics company in Davis is raising its local profile with help from MedStart, a group formed to promote the region's medical-device and technology industry.

The Davis company has built its business in Europe. But Gold Standard Diagnostics is hoping to expand its local presence and has turned to MedStart for assistance.

"MedStart has been a great forum for us to develop local networking relationships," Gold Standard president John Griffiths said through a spokesman.

The Sacramento region has a strong base in medical device, diagnostics and health information technology. But it also has a reputation that big things don't happen here because there is little tech transfer out of the lab into the commercial market.

"The idea is to change that," said Cary Adams, a retired Sacramento health care attorney who chairs MedStart.

Kicked off last year by the Sacramento Area Regional Technology Alliance, the group is modeled after SARTA's CleanStart program for environmental and renewable-energy companies.

About 60 companies with a total of 1,700 employees have been identified by the tech alliance, which covers a nine-county region. About 40 percent of them have either attended an event or are part of the group's CEO Forum or advisory committee.

MedStart's reach goes beyond that to the local health systems and the business community to perhaps 200 companies overall, program director Laura Good said.

"SARTA's MedStart program has really galvanized our region's exciting medical technology sector in the 18 months since it was founded," Good said. "This energy and commitment from the community will drive growth in med tech and will be a major feature of our MedStart Connect event on Sept. 30."

Meanwhile, MedStart launched a Telemedicine Task Force in late July. The mission is to foster innovation and channel investment to new video and telecommunication technologies that provide health care services to home-bound patients and those in rural and underserved areas.

"The timing is right to support innovation in telemedicine in our region," said task force leader Evelyn Milani, who is also president of InfoSYS Inc., a Folsom-based staffing company involved with health-related information technology. Support from the Obama administration and the pending expansion of broadband to rural areas have boosted interest in health care IT. Opportunities are "sprinkled throughout" stimulus funding in the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, Milani said.

Sacramento is well-suited for telemedicine because the UC Davis Health System has a strong - and growing - telemedicine program. The California Center for Connected Health, a new organization designed to promote telehealth, was established in Sacramento in January.

The task force will provide a special network of people, companies and resources focused on the challenges and opportunities in telemedicine while providing all the resources - access to venture capital, education programs and incubation resources - found throughout SARTA and MedStart programs, Adams said.

The first meeting of the MedStart Inventors Forum will precede Wednesday's event, but is by invitation only. The intent is to bring together busy doctors and others who invent medical devices but don't know how to commercialize them, Good said.

Gold Standard Diagnostics, meanwhile, got help from another MedStart program, the med-tech CEO Forum. The group includes more than a dozen local med-tech companies, as well as industry experts and venture capitalists.

"The CEO Forum in particular has been a great way to find other CEOs to share ideas with in different areas, including both medical diagnostics and financing," Griffiths said.