critical-care
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The Startup Teaching Ventilator Patients to Breathe on Their Own Again
Every long stint on a ventilator quietly weakens the one muscle you need to breathe. XN Health's Phlex device stimulates the phrenic nerve through the breathing tube to keep the diaphragm working - and get patients off the machine sooner.
Kathy Wallace
Kathy Wallace is the CEO of LifeCare Hospital of Plano, part of LifeCare Hospitals of North Texas. A registered nurse with roughly 35 years in healthcare and about 18 of them at LifeCare, she rose through clinical and executive roles into the corner office. She is one of an all-female group of CEOs, all trained in critical care, who lead LifeCare's North Texas long-term acute care hospitals. Her focus is on early-intervention and mobilization protocols that shorten recovery times for the most fragile, critically ill patients while cutting readmissions.
Inflammatix, Inc.
Inflammatix is a Sunnyvale, California molecular diagnostics company that reads the body's own immune response instead of hunting for the pathogen. Its FDA-cleared TriVerity test measures 29 host mRNAs from a blood sample and, using machine-learning algorithms, returns three scores in about 30 minutes: likelihood of bacterial infection, likelihood of viral infection, and overall illness severity. Run on the company's benchtop Myrna instrument, it is built for emergency and critical-care clinicians who need to decide fast whether a patient is heading toward sepsis. Spun out of Stanford in 2016, the company has raised more than $205M.
ImaCor, Inc.
ImaCor, Inc. is a New York medical-device company that built the world's first and only hemodynamic transesophageal echocardiography (hTEE) platform for the intensive care unit. Its miniaturized, disposable ClariTEE probe can stay safely in a critically ill patient for up to 72 hours, giving clinicians a continuous, direct window onto the heart - preload, contractility, and right- and left-ventricular function - so they can guide fluids and drugs in real time instead of guessing. In 2022 ImaCor and Clarius Mobile Health launched the FDA-cleared Zura Handheld Hemodynamic Ultrasound, a pocket-sized, 22-ounce TEE system that puts that window in a clinician's hand.
Tim Sweeney
Tim Sweeney is the co-founder and CEO of Inflammatix, a Sunnyvale molecular diagnostics company that reads the immune system instead of hunting for pathogens. A surgeon-turned-entrepreneur with an MD/PhD from Duke and a biomedical informatics background from Stanford, he built TriVerity, an FDA-cleared rapid blood test that measures 29 immune-response genes and uses machine learning to score the likelihood of bacterial infection, viral infection, and severe illness. He has raised more than $200 million to bring precision medicine to sepsis and critical care.
Scott Roth
Scott Roth is a cardiologist who spent two decades reading echocardiograms before deciding the ICU needed a faster way to see the heart. As founder and CEO of ImaCor, he built hemodynamic ultrasound (hTEE) around the disposable, pencil-thin ClariTEE probe that stays in a patient for up to 72 hours, giving clinicians a live look at cardiac filling and function instead of waiting on lab results. In 2022 ImaCor and Clarius released the Zura Handheld, billed as the world's first handheld TEE system, putting that view in a 22-ounce device.
Vituity
Vituity is a 100% physician-owned and led multispecialty partnership delivering acute care across the United States. Founded in 1971 as California Emergency Physicians (CEP America), it rebranded as Vituity in 2018, combining 'vital' and 'acuity.' Today roughly 5,500 doctors and clinicians staff emergency departments, hospital medicine, critical care, anesthesiology, psychiatry, neurology, telehealth and more across hundreds of care sites in 27+ states, treating millions of patients a year - all without private equity, insurer, or hospital-system ownership.
Hal Paz
Hal Paz (Harold L. Paz, M.D., M.S.) is an Operating Partner at Khosla Ventures, where he focuses on digital healthcare innovation and AI-driven health solutions. A physician-scientist and seasoned health system CEO, he has led multi-billion-dollar enterprises at CVS Health/Aetna, Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center, Penn State Health, and Stony Brook University Medicine. He has served as a medical school dean twice over - first at Robert Wood Johnson, then at Penn State - and has authored over 100 papers on sepsis, ARDS, and medical devices. Now at one of Silicon Valley's most ambitious venture firms, he bridges the worlds of clinical medicine and frontier technology, helping founders navigate the notoriously complex terrain of American healthcare.