Tech Tonics: Jonathon Feit on How to Empower First Responders
God help you if you are picked up by ambulance—assuming they can find you easily, they don’t know anything about you, can’t get your medical record, can’t effectively pre-communicate to the hospital what you will need, can’t document your data to ensure a smooth hand-off. When I happened to get an unexpected ambulance ride back in January, the hospital asked for my EKG readouts. Unfortunately they were back in my hotel room on the floor. The first responder organizations, which actually do only about 60% emergency response with much of their work more routine transports of regular patients, are still so far outside the healthcare mainstream.
Jonathon Feit, and his business partner Christian Witt, started Beyond Lucid as a result of their respective personal experiences with first responders, sadly tragic in Witt’s case. Their drive to succeed has been epic, and further complicated and propelled by Feit’s Tourette’s Syndrome. Living with this challenge appears to have made the challenges of entrepreneurship a bit less daunting, as Feit has started numerous new enterprises, including the nation’s first magazine focused on gay and alternative marriage back in 2006. What a long, strange, yet wonderful trip his has been.
Jonathon Feit and I first met when he won the DC to VC competition where I was a judge. Several months later we coincidentally ended up traveling together to Moscow to talk about health IT, drink vodka and, in his case, belly dance at an Uzbeki restaurant. Full disclosure, I’m on the board of his company, Beyond Lucid Technologies, a healthcare IT company that is helping bring the world of first responders (EMT, Ambulance, Fire) out of the technological dark ages for the benefit of those experiencing medical crises, natural disasters and worse.
Posted in:
Audio Podcast, Healthcare, Tech Tonics
