Almost one year ago a man named Mert Iseri described his company SwipeSense at Fargo’s Health Pitch in partnership with Family HealthCare. Since then, the hospital-oriented company has exploded with new customers, now working with Family HealthCare and Sanford Health, among many others. SwipeSense even gained some solid national recognition as one of the Wall Street Journal’s top five Startups of the Year.
Mert recently visited Fargo to check up on SwipeSense systems in place at Family HealthCare, and he was kind enough to agree to an interview for the Emerging Prairie audience. As Health Pitch returns to Fargo this summer, this is a pertinent view of one company that came out of this event and grew into something beautiful.
EP: First things first: how did you meet your fellow founder and establish SwipeSense?
Yuri and I met while we were students at Northwestern University. We started SwipeSense while we were students and founded the company when we were accepted into the Healthbox Accelerator program in Chicago.
EP: What is SwipeSense, and what problem are you trying to solve?
SwipeSense is a hand hygiene system for hospitals that combines the convenience of point of care hand hygiene and the power of real time data. The problem we’re solving is called Hospital-Acquired Infections (HAI’s) – it basically means the bugs patients get after they are admitted into a healthcare institution. Hospitals know that the first line of defense to prevent HAI’s is to increase hand hygiene, and SwipeSense is an affordable solution that improves hand hygiene performance for healthcare workers.
EP: How did you come up with the idea for this product?
SwipeSense was born out of a collaboration with Northshore University Health Systems and Design for America. We spent a summer in the Intensive Care Unit of Northshore to understand the needs of healthcare workers and immediately understood that access to hand hygiene was a huge need in today’s hospitals.
EP: What makes SwipeSense stand out from current methods?
Currently, most hospitals measure hand hygiene by direct observation and attempt to place hand sanitizer dispensers in each room. SwipeSense measures hand hygiene with our Badges – these are smart devices worn by healthcare workers that collect data much more accurately than human observation.
Additionally, healthcare workers can pick up any one of our portable dispensers and have access to point of care hand hygiene during their shift. This saves them time and energy, allowing them to care better for their patients.
EP: How has your idea expanded since your presentation at Health Pitch last summer?
We have added more hospitals that use our system, and we’re currently working on publishing a large scale scientific paper that outlines a definitive reduction in hospital acquired infections. We’re also in more hospitals now, including Family HealthCare in Fargo.
We’ve additionally secured a partnership with Intelligent InSites that we’re extremely excited about, and we’re looking forward to taking our solution to many more organizations with their support.
And finally, we have developed a robust supply chain for our technology focusing on individual user performance rather than individual devices.
EP: What is the next goal for the SwipeSense team?
We love Family HealthCare’s work and are honored to help them achieve a better quality of care. We’re fully operational within the whole facility, and our goal is to grow our presence in hospitals across the country, replicating our success.
EP: What is going to be your biggest struggle in 2014?
We’re growing faster than we expected, with new hospitals signing up to partner with us every month. We’re hyper-focused on ensuring the hospitals that committed to our solution have a fantastic experience with our system no matter how fast we grow.
EP: How can the Fargo community help you further enhance SwipeSense?
We’d love to partner with Sanford Health and expand the reach of our solution to their entire network. If you know anyone that can help us, feel free to reach out to me directly!
