COMPANY OpenTempo LOCATION Williston WEBSITE opentempo.com
YOU HAVE TO CONSTANTLY BE FILLING THE PIPELINE.” OLIVER PARINI
BRIAR ALPERT, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF BIOTEK Adam, attributes the company’s longevity to innovation. If BioTek hadn’t invested heavily in developing the Cytation3, he reasons, revenues would have been down in 2013. “You have to constantly be investing in the future of the company,” Alpert insists. “You have to constantly be filling the pipeline.” For BioTek, that means investing in products, but also in people. “We pay people well,” says Alpert, and the company also picks up the tab for their education. A number of employees have gone back to school on the company’s dime to earn bachelor’s and master’s degrees at UVM, St. Michael’s College and Champlain College. Alpert’s father, Norman, was the firm’s founder and a University of Vermont physiologist. BioTek’s global reach hasn’t loosened its local roots. “We’re hiring Vermont vendors,” says Alpert, citing Winooski neighbor Eastman Benz, whose employees produce circuit boards for the company. “We literally purchase millions of dollars of parts and service in Vermont.” BioTek has also sponsored the Vermont Tech Jam, as well as a local high school robotics team. “The moment you stop making these forward-thinking investments,” he says, “you sign the company’s death warrant.”
Brooke Stahle, director of Peri-Op Services, and resident Lyle Gerety at Fletcher Allan Health Care.
MATTHEW THORSEN
“You have to constantly be investing in the future of the company.
sCheDuLing suCCess
H
ospitals are high-tech environments as far as patient care is concerned, but for many of them, managing doctor and nurse schedules is still a low-tech process. The complexities of accounting for clinical requirements, staff specialities and certifications, as well as vacation requests and union rules, mean that hospitals still frequently build their schedules by hand. That inflates staffing costs, which typically make up more than 50 percent of a hospital’s operating budget. Williston-based OpenTempo views this challenge as an opportunity. The rapidly growing company, founded in 2006 by CEO Rich Miller, has designed software that automates the health care staff scheduling process. “We make sure you have the right physician, the right nurse, the right tech in the right place, at the right time,” says John Jordan, vice president of sales and marketing. Given soaring health care costs and falling reimbursements, this is an area where the right technology can have a big impact. It has in the operating room at Fletcher Allen Health Care in Burlington. Building a schedule for its 160 nurses used to take a health care professional about 80 hours a month. OpenTempo’s software cut that to just eight hours a month, a tenfold reduction that equates to less time on paperwork and more time on patients. The Fletcher Allen anesthesiology department also uses OpenTempo, as do a growing number of academic and clinical clients across the country, including Mass General, MD Anderson, Vanderbilt University and the University of Illinois. As a result, since January 2013, the company has expanded from a handful of staffers to nearly 30 employees, including one recruit from the Vermont Tech Jam. Many of its new hires have come from recently downsized companies such as GE Healthcare, IBM and PKC/Sharecare, and are being retrained thanks to a Vermont Department of Labor grant. OpenTempo’s software provides a tremendous ROI for large health care systems with hundreds of employees to manage. And Jordan points out that many of them haven’t upgraded yet. “These organizations need a way to control their operating costs while maintaining excellent patient care,” he says. “It’s almost shocking how much green space there is in this market.”
QUICKFACTS From 2001-2010, the U.S. bioscience industry grew by 6.4%, adding more than 96,000 jobs. — Battelle/BIO State Bioscience Industry Development Report
Mobile health technology usage is growing rapidly in the U.S. Analysts predict that the size of the worldwide mobile health market will reach $23 billion by the end of 2017. — Center for Technology Innovation at the Brookings Institution, in its Health in China and the United States report
H E A LT H C A R E
15