New Health IT Initiative Takes Cognitive Medical Beyond Military

Doug Burke, president of Cognitive Medical Systems, tells me this morning the San Diego-based health IT startup is implementing a wireless clinical support system for the Perinatal Quality Collaborative of North Carolina. The startup will integrate its health IT system and analytics platform with handheld devices that doctors and other health care providers can use to improve the care of mothers and infants admitted to the labor and delivery and neonatal intensive care units of participating hospitals.

The initiative represents a departure from the military market that Cognitive Medical initially targeted, which includes consulting, program administration, project management, software engineering, and database design.

“Our goal was always to cut our teeth on the Department of Defense (DoD) and Veterans Administration [programs], but we ultimately want to be selling products to commercial markets as well,” Burke says. “With the downturn in the DoD budget, it’s not a bad thing to be doing.”

In North Carolina, Burke says a key element will be clinical decision support software that helps doctors and other caregivers make better clinical decisions about perinatal care. The system is intended to eliminate time-consuming delays in collecting and analyzing health data, reduce paper reports and communications, and to make it easier to share information with families.

The North Carolina collaborative consists of a wide array of maternal and newborn care providers, health insurers, public health agencies, and others throughout the state. The organization has conducted initiatives that have reduced the number of less-than-full-term deliveries in 40 North Carolina hospitals by 43 percent and decreased the number of catheter-associated infections by 75 percent in 13 neonatal intensive care units.

Author: Bruce V. Bigelow

In Memoriam: Our dear friend Bruce V. Bigelow passed away on June 29, 2018. He was the editor of Xconomy San Diego from 2008 to 2018. Read more about his life and work here. Bruce Bigelow joined Xconomy from the business desk of the San Diego Union-Tribune. He was a member of the team of reporters who were awarded the 2006 Pulitzer Prize in National Reporting for uncovering bribes paid to San Diego Republican Rep. Randy “Duke” Cunningham in exchange for special legislation earmarks. He also shared a 2006 award for enterprise reporting from the Society of Business Editors and Writers for “In Harm’s Way,” an article about the extraordinary casualty rate among employees working in Iraq for San Diego’s Titan Corp. He has written extensively about the 2002 corporate accounting scandal at software goliath Peregrine Systems. He also was a Gerald Loeb Award finalist and National Headline Award winner for “The Toymaker,” a 14-part chronicle of a San Diego start-up company. He takes special satisfaction, though, that the series was included in the library for nonfiction narrative journalism at the Nieman Foundation for Journalism at Harvard University. Bigelow graduated from U.C. Berkeley in 1977 with a degree in English Literature and from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism in 1979. Before joining the Union-Tribune in 1990, he worked for the Associated Press in Los Angeles and The Kansas City Times.