The status quo can be quite the barrier for many leaders and businesses to get past. David Thomas Palmer recognized this in his role as CEO of ClearCount Medical Solutions Inc., a company that works to prevent retained foreign bodies and improve surgical safety.
Palmer left a prestigious position at Pittsburgh Life Sciences Greenhouse to take on this role to join an under-capitalized company with a novel idea. When he started, he wanted to get over this major obstacle and introduce a new way for hospitals to address the process of counting and reconciling sponge counts.
The company’s first product series are the first systems to manage sponges in the operating room through a combination of counting and detection. The two systems in this series enable a device-reconciled count to avoid the most common hazard of surgery, the falsely reconciled manual count. The system also provides a wand for a scan over the patient or elsewhere in the operating room to quickly detect missing items. The benefit of sponges is that they do not need line-of-sight to be counted, as is needed with competitive products based on bar-coding. The system saves 10 to 15 minutes associated with finding missing sponges, which at $200 a minute estimated operating room expenses, can mean thousands of dollars. It also eliminates the need for X-rays to find missing sponges and reduces litigation associated with patients who are sent home with sponges sewn in and who face serious infection and have to go through another surgery and recovery process.
He has successfully built a skilled and cohesive management team, raised the appropriate capital and provided clear vision toward product development, and advanced market demand. He has established ClearCount as a market leader and also differentiated the company as a result of his business acumen.
How to reach: ClearCount Medical Solutions Inc., (412) 931-7233 or www.clearcount.com
