We founded MDii out of passion to improve patient outcomes and the clinician experience. We are an independent group based in the Minneapolis, MN area focused on medical device integration. We believe electronic communications between medical devices and computing systems is transformative technology. One which improves clinical outcomes today, and builds a data-rich foundation that will help change medicine as clinical decision support tools such as artificial intelligence and machine learning play larger roles tomorrow.
Our co-founders (Luis Melendez and John Oakman) met working together on the planning, build-out and implementation of the largest medical device integration initiative in the US at that time, with thousands of medical devices at 22 hospital campuses of all sizes – from large academic medical centers with over a thousand beds to small community hospitals with nineteen. Although their paths to that point varied – engineering and project delivery – they both had encountered many of the same medical device integration (MDI) challenges and had independently developed similar mitigations and resolutions.
Luis presented on the challenges of patient context at the 2010 FDA (CDRH) Workshop on Medical Device Interoperability when an attendee from a national healthcare IT consulting company asked, “If a large hospital like a Boston academic medical center – with all your expertise and resources – is having challenges integrating medical devices, how is a smaller hospital supposed to do this?”
Since then, we created repeatable and sustainable processes to integrate any make and model of medical devices with electronic health record systems, scalable to hospitals of all sizes. As the cost of delivering healthcare, particularly in acute care environments, has shot up – we believe that it just makes good sense to share our experience and proven processes we developed over thousands of hours of analysis and testing to enable other hospitals to most cost-efficiently achieve MDI.
Luis: After decades working as a clinical engineer in acute care settings at an internationally recognized academic medical center, and overcoming enterprise systems integration challenges, Luis has deep insight into how hospitals improve patient outcomes and clinician experience by integrating medical devices with electronic health records, informed by years of side-by-side collaboration with clinicians in acute care environments.
His expertise includes knowledge in intimate detail of how to integrate medical devices of numerous manufacturers, and computing infrastructure, with leading EHR and middleware systems, and deliver the implementation to smoothly support clinical operations. Luis has the patents, publications, attestations and practitioner’s track record of a world-class expert and contributor to international standards in medical device integration.
Luis received his Bachelor’s degree in Mechanical Engineering from Northeastern University. He lives in the Boston area.
John: Senior leader of complex IT initiatives for advanced users of systems integration technologies. John draws upon 25+ years experience delivering ‘must succeed’ strategic initiatives to inform delivery best practices for healthcare providers’ MDI initiatives. Former Big 4 principal consultant, John’s engagement management guides each project from initiation to requirements definition, analysis, design, testing and implementation to assure each client’s desired outcome.
John led the following ground-breaking initiatives to integrate medical device stand-alone technologies for first time:
• Delivered 1st integration of mobile anesthesia with leading EHR system
• 1st production integration of physiological monitor vendor with leading EHR system
• 1st production integration of stand-alone anesthesia machines with leading EHR system via external vendor’s middleware.
John received his MBA from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth. He lives in the Minneapolis area.