Information management in medical imaging is a very crucial aspect of patient care. Timely and fast information delivery, storage of the information, securing the data, as well as making it accessible to the right people at right time will help save a lot of money and improve speed to care. Taking these concerns into consideration, a radiology software development company, Nautilus Medical, was started with an aim to build the company value. Realizing that it was not just about building the company, but that they had the chance to affect healthcare as a whole. The company grew less concerned about earning profits and more about how it can lower healthcare costs, serve the community, and ultimately save lives. Today, Nautilus Medical provides end-to-end solutions for medical professionals working with radiology or patient information along with many more tools to enable professionals to lower costs, speed up workflow, which leads to better care for the patients.
Nautilus Medical is focused on building a platform for collecting critical patient data and images on healthcare networks. It converts all file types collected into a universal format and redistributes that information for patients, specialists, and referring physicians. Nautilus’s robust platform has been beneficial to more than a thousand facilities. These include more than 30 of the top 50 medical centers – Cedar’s Sinai, Harvard, Shriners, Cleveland Clinic, Northwestern Harvard, Columbia and Cornell Medical Centers, New York Presbyterian, Barnes-Jewish UPENN/UPMC, to name a few. The company has recently partnered with Samsung’s radiology division to offer a multi-featured solution for expansion into the market.
Every customer of Nautilus is treated like a high value professional that needs to solve mission critical issues within their radiology environment. The relationships the company creates become part of a special group of select users of the most thoughtful radiology software on the market. Nautilus firmly believes, “Being the biggest is not important to our customers. However, being the best is extremely important to our customers.”
The Spark to the Fire of Nautilus
Tim Kelley, the Founder and CEO of Nautilus Medical, is a soft-spoken person with many varied interests, including painting, basketball, and martial arts. This diverse background has given him the perspective on product design, ways to approach the market, and management of the employees. He has always had a philosophy, “Start with problems, then offer solutions that ease the pain.” And so far, it has worked quite well for him!
Being an optimistic person, he brings positivity to the company’s development and daily progress. Tim’s contribution to healthcare started with the growth of the first medical disc burning systems twenty years ago to eliminate x-ray film. Now, he envisions eliminating the discs and growing the largest secure exchange platform. Amongst his employees, he is known as a person who can see around corners and puts customers first. Tim believes, “Revenue is merely a by-product of how happy our customers are.”
Voyaging towards Success
Tim started Nautilus Medical with a team of former senior healthcare executives from renowned companies such as J&J, BD, McKesson, TDK, and Canon. This team wanted more control over development and came together to build customer-centric software from the user perspective. Nautilus, thus, began as a value leader with only a few key features to aid its growth and establish a reputation for quality and service. Having launched during the financial crisis, the company had to change its focus from revenue to strategic brand building. Through the years, Nautilus has grown to be a brand of high reputation with numerous high-profile clients. It plans on entering a new phase for the consumer driven healthcare space with special attention to patient services.
Powerful Platforms
MatrixRay is the main product offered by Nautilus. It is one of the most feature rich image and patient information platforms, available in the healthcare market. It provides various services that include storing of data and images securely; viewing images anywhere and anytime with robust FDA viewer; scanning film and documents to DICOM; PACS query and retrieve; EMR/EHR integration for reports, labs, etc; auto storing and auto routing studies; converting DICOM or Non-DICOM images; burning CDs and DVDs with viewers and encrypting if needed; importing files and CDs as universal DICOM; anonymizing and masking patient data; printing any file (PFD, Word, web page, document) to DICOM; receiving any HL7 data and adding it to patient folder; free text reporting and optional advanced biometric reporting; and clientless uploading and exchanging of images and information. It allows quick and secure sharing of images with patients, professionals, and specialists in the fastest, most secure way in the market. All of this adds up to complete flexibility, total security, and problem solving that saves money and lives and Nautilus provides all of this at the lowest cost possible.
BebeVue is another prominent product of Nautilus, which repurposes elements of the company’s platform to deliver keepsake pre-natal ultrasounds to new moms at the point of care. Regulations in healthcare kept OB/GYNs from giving the respective moms the videos of their respective ultrasounds and created a billion-dollar boutique keepsake ultrasound business. Nautilus’ platform takes the clinical ultrasound video clips and creates a non-diagnostic keepsake video online with built in social media connections for easy sharing. BebeVue also offers the best patient education and a robust search directory for the practices. This education and keepsake video results in lower liability, better compliance, higher patient satisfaction, and better outcomes for new moms!
Solving Problems, Improving Care
Communication issue in the healthcare network is a major problem the industry faces. It is caused by fractured infrastructure, old equipment, outdated systems, disparate language protocols, and nobody to take responsibility and find answers to this problem. The key product of Nautilus, MatrixRay can take any file formats and make them compatible with other systems. This ensures that the images can be restored in other systems, saving nearly 20% of time when the patient gets rescanned for the same images resulting in tremendous waste of time and monetary resources. This platform can reduce costs, reduce rescans, speed time to care, improve efficiency, reduce aggravation, and possibly save more lives, and may be used by any facility of any size.
As healthcare is becoming more consumer-driven, Nautilus makes sure that patients have more control. Its platform doesn’t tie the patient to one site’s portal. It instead makes them a part of the whole Nautilus matrix of sites numbering in the thousands. They receive free storage for themselves and their family. Using Nautilus’ platform, patients can view or share data and images with anyone.
Staying on the Top
Understanding its customers’ main problems and finding ways to best address those problems has been tantamount to Nautilus Medical’s success. Apart from that, the company has ensured security, an issue which most of the professionals managing PHI (Protected Healthcare Information) find difficult to tackle. Nautilus has built the only private key peer to peer exchange and storage system. It is considered as the best method of protecting data from hackers. Along with security, the company has brought in speed and ease-of-use in the medical imaging space.
With an easy design process, most features of Nautilus’ platform makes implementation of processes simple and painless. Adding this with the affordable prices the company brings it at, makes Nautilus the partner of choice for the clients.
Talking about how to move ahead, Tim jokingly states, “If we just do a little bit every day, eventually the task will become completely overwhelming.”
Notable Achievements
For its significant contribution to healthcare for years and intelligent solutions it offers, Nautilus has been honored with Red Herring’s Best Start-up of North America, Chicago’s Top 100 Innovative Companies, HealthCare Tech Outlook’s Best Healthcare Solutions Provider, and CIO Bulletin’s 10 Best Healthcare Companies of 2019 among others..
However, the best achievement for the company remains the satisfaction of fulfilling the promises it has made to its clients. “We keep hearing stories about how our platform helped in a mission critical situation and saved a life or sped up the time to care. That’s real impact supported by heartfelt motivation,” expresses Tim. Nautilus has been a trustworthy and loyal partner of various high-profile clients like Cleveland Clinic, Harvard, etc. The feedbacks it has received has been the true testament of its success, like “I have yet to see any other program have tools like this- very impressive”; “It’s done everything we need it to do and more, it’s been rock solid”; “BTW, we are extremely happy and thankful for all of the time and effort that you guys have put in for us. I know that on occasion, people ask for recommendations, feel free to point them in my direction. You will get nothing but blazingly positive responses.”
Looking into the Future
Witnessing the social conscience of healthcare, Nautilus foresees that certain players will emerge for their relevance to solving today’s issues. Having heard too many stories about big pharma, big insurance and labs that tainted the healthcare landscape, the company believes that there is a tremendous opportunity for it across all medical disciplines, including veterinary, podiatry, ortho, neuro, cardiac, etc. Nautilus aims to become a standard in healthcare communication.
