Georgia Tech to Offer New Professional Certificate in Lean Healthcare
To help address rising costs and improve patient care, Georgia Tech will begin offering a new professional certificate in lean healthcare this September. Medical professionals such as physicians, nurses, quality mangers, laboratory personnel and health care executives will learn lean management principles – a set of tools derived mostly from the Toyota Production System widely used in manufacturing – that helps identify and steadily eliminate waste from an organization’s operations.
Participants will work one-on-one with a lean health care expert to discover lean principles through health care simulations, apply lean thinking to their organizations and begin identifying areas of opportunity. The certificate program consists of four courses: Lean Healthcare Introduction – A Case Study Review, How to Apply Lean Thinking to Healthcare Organizations, Applying Value Stream Mapping and A3 Problem-Solving Methods, and Turnover Time Reduction.
“In this era of decreasing reimbursements and increasing costs, lean methodology can ensure that health care organizations remain viable and safe,” said Richard Mitchell, M.D., medical director of Georgia Tech’s Healthcare Performance Group. “Obtaining your certification as a lean practitioner can put you in a position to help lead your organization into the future.”
For six years, Georgia Tech has been working with health care professionals to conduct lean assessments, teach basic lean concepts, develop value stream maps to analyze the flow of materials and information, and implement rapid process improvement projects. The Healthcare Performance Group has worked with more than 15 hospitals across the state.
“Lean helped us get to the root of our problems in health care: waste. Until you can see it, you don’t appreciate how rampant it is,” said Leigh Hamby, M.D., chief medical officer of Piedmont Healthcare. “Lean tools help you identify and eliminate waste.”
The first hands-on course in the certificate series – How to Apply Lean Thinking to Healthcare Organizations – will be held Oct. 3 through 7 in Atlanta. Enrollment in the courses, totaling 5.4 CEUs, is $3,780. Each paid attendee can register a colleague at no cost. For more information or to register, call 404-385-3501 or visit www.pe.gatech.edu/leanhealth.
For more information on health care performance improvement services offered by Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, contact Kelley Hundt (404-894-4607); E-mail: (ude.hcetag.etavonninull@tdnuh.yellek).
About Enterprise Innovation Institute:
The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute helps companies, entrepreneurs, economic developers and communities improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. It is one of the most comprehensive university-based programs of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization and economic development in the nation.
Enterprise Innovation Institute
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 314
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail (ude.hcetag.etavonninull@noot.nhoj).
Writer: Nancy Fullbright
Patient Health Care Records Ready to Go Viral
Taking control of your health — from organizing medical records and lab results following doctor visits to logging efforts for dropping those few extra pounds — one day might be as easy and intuitive as online banking. A groundbreaking project in northwest Georgia soon will encourage consumers to play a bigger role in their health care by creating electronic personal health records, uploading medical information and images into one easy-to-access location a button click away. . . . The cancer coalition plans to develop its exchange over the next two years, with data sharing beginning in the next six to nine months, said Phil Lamson, a senior health care consultant at the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute. It will focus first on cancer patients but eventually include the chronically ill, as well as healthy people, Lamson said.
http://www.ajc.com/news/patient-health-care-records-1112756.html
Proximus Mobility to Create 100 Jobs in Georgia
A promising start-up company in Naples has packed its bags and left its home. Proximus Mobility has moved out of Naples and out of Florida. The company’s headquarters are now in Atlanta, Ga. The mobile marketing company expects to create 100 jobs there over the next three years. . . .Proximus Mobility is now inside the Advanced Technology Development Center, a recognized science and technology incubator at the Georgia Institute of Technology. . . This is where we are starting out here in Atlanta,” Zeto said. “It gives us great access to the university and Georgia Tech is a great school.” The company’s affiliation with Georgia Tech will give it access to top-notch research and technology students and graduates. The cost of doing business in Georgia is also less than it is in Florida, Zeto said.
Alpharetta Incubator to Launch, Backed by $10M Seed Fund
An Alpharetta small business incubator, backed by a $10 million accelerator fund, aims to grow the next generation of companies. Alpharetta Accelerator (AA) hopes to attract capital light software startups, medical device/services firms and green tech companies… Alpharetta Accelerator launches on the heels of a similar venture launched by Georgia Tech. The Georgia Tech “accelerator” program, held twice a year, would invest up to $25,000 in each of the 12 to 20 startups and help them develop into a “fundable” businesses. Flashpoint Investments LLC, a new entity managed by angel investing institution and Imlay President Sig Mosley, will invest an up to $500,000 fund in the selected startups. Both Flashpoint and now Alpharetta Accelerator aim to address a major issue facing Atlanta’s startup community — a lack of early stage, local capital. The region has lost promising entrepreneurs and companies after outside capital lured them elsewhere.
Project Management Consultants Expand Business with Help from Georgia Tech
Project Success, Inc. (PSI), an Atlanta-based project management training and consulting firm, recently utilized the services of Georgia Tech’s Procurement Assistance Center (GTPAC) to expand its business into the government sector. GTPAC is a program that assists companies with all aspects of government procurement processes.
“We’ve been in business for almost 28 years now, and we teach the practical aspects of project management. We work in all industry sectors, in manufacturing, energy, marketing, software and IT,” said David Halm, a senior consultant at the company. “With the downturn in the economy in late 2008, we recognized that the manufacturing sector was going to continue to decline, so we took a suggestion from one of our consultants to get on the U.S. General Services Administration schedule.”
The General Services Administration (GSA) oversees the business of the U.S. federal government. According to its website, GSA supplies federal purchasers with “cost-effective, high-quality products and services from commercial vendors.” Halm was referred to GTPAC after attending a GSA-sponsored event in Atlanta.
“We learned about the educational and classroom offerings through GTPAC, and I took several classes, including Introduction to Government Contracting, Understanding the GSA Schedules Process and Using the Computer to Win Government Contracts,” Halm recalled. “Those classes allowed me to get connected to Chuck Schadl, director of GTPAC, and Joe Beaulieu, a procurement counselor. As we researched the GSA requirements, we jotted down ideas about the best way to structure our proposal.”
Beaulieu helped PSI structure a proposal under GSA’s Mission Oriented Business Integrated Services, or MOBIS. Under the MOBIS schedule, PSI may provide mission oriented business integrated services and products to U.S. Government agencies. The MOBIS objective is to enable federal agencies to improve performance, quality, timeliness and efficiencies throughout their organizations.
“Getting a GSA contract basically means that all the negotiating points – the pricing, the delivery – all those terms have already been negotiated. So a government agency can purchase from Project Success through the GSA process. It opens a lot of doors,” Halm noted. “In the GSA seminar, the speaker said that more than 90 percent of companies that set out to get a GSA contract never get there. Having this contract offers great marketing potential and has helped us maintain and generate business in this downturn.”
GTPAC, part of the Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute, provides no-cost assistance with government procurement to any company licensed to do business in Georgia. Each year, GTPAC conducts seminars in Albany, Athens, Atlanta, Augusta, Carrollton, Columbus, Gainesville, Rockmart, Savannah and Warner Robins. The center assists companies with all aspects of federal, state and local government procurement processes, including solicitation analysis, proposal preparation, pre- and post-award counseling, and quality and accounting systems. Procurement counselors also analyze whether companies have the potential for participating in the government procurement process.
“It’s very useful to be able to use GTPAC as a sounding board, because the counselors understand the specific requirements,” Halm said. “In dealing with us, Joe helped us maintain the confidence we needed to stay on track. GTPAC provided tangible, direct guidance, as well as the more intangible, but equally important, encouragement.”
About Enterprise Innovation Institute:
The Georgia Tech Enterprise Innovation Institute helps companies, entrepreneurs, economic developers and communities improve their competitiveness through the application of science, technology and innovation. It is one of the most comprehensive university-based programs of business and industry assistance, technology commercialization and economic development in the nation.
Enterprise Innovation Institute
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 314
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contact: John Toon (404-894-6986); E-mail (ude.hcetag.etavonninull@noot.nhoj).
Writer: Nancy Fullbright
New Center Helps Bring Medical Technology to Market
Researchers across Georgia and the Southeast soon will have a new outlet for turning their ideas into reality for medical devices with the launch of the Global Center for Medical Innovation. . . . Ideas for new inventions previously have come from Georgia’s universities, medical practices and others groups, but many weren’t developed because the ability to build prototypes and other support structures weren’t there, and the projects were moved to California and other states, said Wayne Hodges, the center’s executive director. “Too often, they were staying there,” Hodges said. The center will be a resource for developing and testing prototypes, plus connecting with investors or companies interested in devices, he said. It will focus initially on cardiology, orthopedics and pediatrics. Slated to open early next year, the center is a partnership of Georgia Tech, the Georgia Research Alliance, Piedmont Healthcare and Saint Joseph’s Translational Research Institute. It has received roughly $3.6 million in funding from the research alliance and the U.S. Economic Development Administration.
http://www.ajc.com/business/new-center-helps-bring-1068812.html
Atlanta Company Uses Georgia Tech Innovation to Provide Stronger Security for Wireless Financial Transactions
Startup company Whisper Communications is developing software to provide improved security for financial transactions that use the new “digital wallet” technology now under development.
The quality of signals transmitted from devices such as smart phones can degrade dramatically with distance. Whisper Communications is taking advantage of that basic law of physics to provide more secure wireless communication, including protection for financial transactions that use the “digital wallet” technology now under development.
Based on patent-pending technology from the Georgia Institute of Technology, the Atlanta company has developed an encoding methodology that makes data signals transmitted beyond its “cone of silence” useless to any eavesdroppers. Whisper is now working with First Data, a major payment processing provider, to demonstrate this layer of security using two of the newest Android phones.
“Our product will give consumers a higher degree of confidence that their private information is being protected during transactions, without them having to do anything,” said Steven McLaughlin, co-developer of the technology and a Ken Byers Professor in Georgia Tech’s School of Electrical and Computer Engineering.
Digital wallet technology will enable consumers to use their smart phones and other devices to make financial transactions, replacing traditional plastic credit cards. But without strong security, transferring data from the phones to merchant terminals could expose it to theft from “sniffer” devices that can capture wireless information.
Whisper’s software would be installed on mobile devices carrying the digital wallet technology, said Jeffrey McConnell, CEO of the company. It would automatically encode the users’ credit card information, which would then be decoded by similar software on the merchant side of the transaction. Because of the company’s proprietary coding, the information would only be readable within two or three feet of the merchant terminal – and hopelessly garbled beyond that distance.
“Once you get outside of that cone of silence, communications is no longer possible,” McConnell explained. “An eavesdropper hoping to get confidential information would get nothing. This allows us to set a defined zone within which secure communication can occur. Once you get beyond that boundary, no usable information can get out.”
The company believes that mobile financial transactions are the most compelling first application for the product, but the technology could be used wherever data traveling wirelessly needs to be protected. Other uses might be in medical devices that transmit wirelessly, in the electronic check-in pads being developed to gather patient information in medical offices, and in streaming video played via wireless devices, McConnell said.
“Our technology is an encoding methodology, so the methodology is the same with any application, whether it’s for mobile payments or high-speed video,” said McConnell, who has a background with payment processing companies including American Express, First Data and Western Union.
Whisper Communications has so far received seed funding from the Georgia Research Alliance (GRA) VentureLab program, Atlanta-based Imlay Investments and the Georgia Tech Edison Fund. It has also received a Phase I Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF).
The company has been working with First Data to evaluate the new product. A full demonstration is planned for this summer, and McConnell said the software could be ready for the marketplace within six months.
The company expects to license its product to the developers of digital wallets, and to the makers of merchant terminals. Worldwide, there are about 20 million terminals in operation, and most of them would be candidates for the Whisper software. In the United States alone, there are 150 million smart phones.
With its strong roots in financial services and information security, Atlanta is a good place to build a company like Whisper, McLaughlin noted.
“Atlanta is an ideal city for the mobile payments and security approach that Whisper is taking,” he said. “It has always been known as a go-to place for cybersecurity and has the largest concentration of credit card payment companies in the United States, so the combination of security and payments is a natural.”
Whisper’s original technology was developed by McLaughlin and Georgia Tech alumni Cenk Argon and Demijan Klinc. It has roots going back to “quantum key distribution” research done at Georgia Tech’s Lorraine campus with collaborators from Portugal.
McLaughlin, who is also Georgia Tech’s Vice Provost for International Initiatives, realized that technology developed for the earlier project could have applications in securing wireless communications. But he didn’t have a startup company in mind until he was approached by staff from the Georgia Tech VentureLab program. The VentureLab team, which included Paul Freet, Keith McGreggor and Stephen Fleming, learned of the technology and approached McLaughlin about forming a company.
“VentureLab has been nothing less than fantastic for us,” said McLaughlin. “From the very beginning, we felt high interest, support and a push to succeed.”
VentureLab introduced McLaughlin to McConnell, and was instrumental in obtaining funding to support early commercialization studies.
“We have created a good product, none of which would have been there without what VentureLab did,” said McConnell. “They helped the researchers and pushed them to explore how this technology could be turned into a viable company.”
VentureLab is Georgia Tech’s comprehensive center for technology commercialization, open to all faculty, research staff and students who want to form startup companies based upon their research. Part of Georgia Tech’s Enterprise Innovation Institute, VentureLab transforms innovations into companies by developing engaging business models, connecting researchers with experienced entrepreneurs, locating sources of early-stage financing and preparing these new companies for global markets.
Many companies created within VentureLab become part of the Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC), Georgia Tech’s startup accelerator. ATDC has been helping to launch and build successful technology companies for more than 30 years.
Research News & Publications Office
Georgia Institute of Technology
75 Fifth Street, N.W., Suite 314
Atlanta, Georgia 30308 USA
Media Relations Contacts: John Toon (404-894-6986)(ude.hcetagnull@nootj) or Abby Robinson (404-385-2264)(ude.hcetag.etavonninull@ybba).
Writer: John Toon
Gov. Deal’s Competitiveness Initiative Should Build on Past Efforts
Once again, the Atlanta region and the State of Georgia are seeking ways to improve the state’s competitive edge. For more than a decade, economic development leaders have been trying to figure out what industries Georgia should target to strengthen the state’s economy. The latest version of this endeavor is Gov. Nathan Deal’s Competitiveness Initiative. . .On Monday, July 18, Deal’s Georgia Competitiveness Initiative Summit was to focus on the metro Atlanta economy. In addition to Cummiskey and Clark, Tad Leithead, chairman of the Atlanta Regional Commission, was listed as “special guests.” The featured speakers: Bud Peterson, president of Georgia Tech; Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed; Donna Hyland, CEO of Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta; Larry Callahan, CEO of Patillo Construction Co and chairman of the Regional Business Coalition; Bob Drewel, executive director of the Puget Sound Regional Council and founder of the Prosperity Partnership.
ATDC Launches Entrepreneur in Residence Program to Mentor Startups
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- Jamie Bardin
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- Tim Dorr
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- Hezi Moore
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- Blake Patton
The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) is known for providing strategic entrepreneurial advice and key business connections to help grow Georgia-based technology startup companies. The Georgia Tech startup accelerator is now expanding on these abilities with the creation of a new Entrepreneur in Residence (EIR) program.
The program features four EIRs with a wealth of experience in the technology startup world. Jamie Bardin, Tim Dorr, Hezi Moore and Blake Patton will all serve as advisors for ATDC member companies in the areas of business strategy, fundraising, team development and more. They will also seek opportunities to connect startups with prospective business advisors, investors and customers in the market.
“Our EIRs offer experience and knowledge that is extremely valuable to startups. They have lived through the demanding process of starting a business, both the failures and successes,” said Nina Sawczuk, ATDC’s general manager and director of startup services. “They will work with young companies to avoid common mistakes and find ways to excel. This is the heart of what ATDC does.”
Each mentor is a repeat entrepreneur with a track record of success in starting, growing and funding a business.
- Bardin was the CEO of EZ Prints, which he grew from a startup to a $25 million company, and has experience in business leadership for mid-market and Fortune 500 companies as well.
- Dorr is a Georgia Tech grad who has founded multiple successful web-based startup companies, including A Small Orange and the hot in-town co-working space Ignition Alley.
- Moore has more than 20 years of experience in technology and business leadership, having raised more than $45 million in venture capital funding. He has founded several technology security companies, including Reflex Security and MicroTech systems.
- Patton brings 20 years of experience in startup, venture-backed and publicly traded companies in the finance and payments world. He was the president of Interactive Advisory Software and the CEO of iKobo before joining ATDC.
EIRs will host weekly office hours to accommodate one-on-one meetings with member companies. In addition, they will conduct learning circles to help facilitate peer-to-peer learning and networking. Moore will lead the Friday morning ATDC circle in Alpharetta’s Roam Atlanta co-working space. All four will also regularly participate in ATDC events like CapVenture, Brown Bags and the monthly New Member Orientations and Entrepreneur’s Nights.
“In my new role, I am really looking forward to helping the entrepreneurial and startup community in Atlanta.” Dorr said. “Atlanta has a lot of drive to become a big player in the startup world and I’m excited to help make it happen.”
About ATDC:
The Advanced Technology Development Center (ATDC) serves as the hub for technology entrepreneurship in Georgia. Founded in 1980, ATDC helps Georgia entrepreneurs launch and build successful technology companies. Through business incubation and acceleration services, ATDC has supported the creation of hundreds of high tech companies that have raised more than a billion dollars in outside financing. Headquartered in Atlanta’s Technology Square, ATDC members benefit from a close proximity to Georgia Tech and connections with other Georgia research universities. It was named one of the “10 technology incubators that are changing the world” by Forbes Magazine.
Media Relations Contacts:
Kate Grusich/Chris Glazier
404.419.9226
Metro Execs Weigh in on Competitiveness
Business leaders from across metro Atlanta had their say Monday in what Gov. Nathan Deal called the most important non-legislative initiative of his first year in office. The Atlanta Regional Commission hosted an economic development summit on the campus of Georgia Tech, the fourth in a series of brainstorming sessions being held across the state this summer by the Georgia Competitiveness Initiative. Deal hatched the project to gather feedback from business executives on what the state should do to help create jobs as Georgia rebounds from the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression.