Runner-Up: Medical Education Technologies Inc.

Runner-Up: Medical Education Technologies Inc.

By David Wexler

Associates Editor

We've all heard the adage practice makes perfect. But with new simulation technology, gone are the days of medical students practicing life or death procedures on real patients.

Medical schools and health care organizations are now turning to Sarasota-based Medical Education Technologies Inc., which provides simulation technology that replicates a human being. The simulators are essentially "computerized mannequins" that have a pulse, heartbeat and can even breathe in oxygen.

The simulators replicate a human being's medical condition, physiology, cardiovascular and respiratory system. It can take a human's health history - age, gender and health condition - and then mold the data into a physical mannequin. The end result is Stan, or a "standard man" used in medical training nationwide.

The efforts at the company, known as METI, have landed it as a runner-up for the Technology Innovation Awards, sponsored by Gulf Coast Business Review/82 Degrees Tech.

Currently, there are more than 1,200 METI-made simulators in community colleges, nursing schools, medical colleges and universities, hospitals and the military. The human patient simulators are used in about 70 of the 125 medical schools in the United States, well as 400 schools overseas.

"The mannequins react to physiology as you would," says Louis Oberndorf, chief executive officer of Medical Education Technologies. "If you were diagnosed with a heart attack, the simulator would react exactly like you would."

Oberndorf founded the company in 1996 after spending 25 years in the aerospace industry. The technology is backed by a series of patents owned by the University of Florida. The company licensed the product from UF, which introduced the technology 10 years ago.

In addition to teaching students and doctors, the simulators are also used to better train post-disaster teams during a massive public health crisis, such as Hurricane Katrina.

Public health officials, both at the federal and state level, are studying the impact of crisis situations where there is a massive influx of refugees with a variety of existing health conditions, Oberndorf says.

"During Hurricane Katrina, they lost a lot of their records and in some cases, doctors didn't know what drugs or prescriptions these victims were taking," Oberndorf says. "At the rescue level, you had teams from all over the world trained differently with different protocol. We believe METI will be used by some task forces to actually look at how we can use simulation to train those teams and standardize this training."

Oberndorf says his company is an educational business first, committed to providing technologically advanced learning tools that educators need to alter the learning process. His goal is to improve safety and, ultimately, save more lives.

"There are some procedures where eventually you're going to have to practice on a real person," Oberndorf says. "But when you come to that real patient, you will have been through that condition or that kind of patient over and over again so you can act instinctively in a correct way."

The old method of medical education entailed following another physician around while he or she made their rounds or via textbooks and videos.

"With simulation, you're able to create virtually every critical kind of patient and every disease state and then practice it on a simulator as opposed to practicing it on a human," he says. "It allows physicians to duplicate or create patients that they can learn on and practice on with zero harm and risk to real patients."

Over the past 10 years, METI has continued to evolve the technology. In 1998, the company ventured into pediatrics, modeling simulators of 5- to 7-year-olds. Earlier this year, it introduced a baby mannequin for 3- to 6-month olds.

Tech Time

Louis Oberndorf, head of Medical Education Technologies, says his biggest problem with technology is the uncertainty. He likes the innovation side, but he says when "you explore and expand and continue to innovate, there's the unknown factor. No businessman, whether it be a technology-oriented business or non-technology business, likes uncertainty."

Oberndorf says to be certain you are solving some real-life problem when starting a technology business: "The biggest fault that technology start-ups and entrepreneurs make is they believe because they have technology and they can do something, it must have a market," he says. "Very often in a technology industry, you have a technology, you create a product because you can and it doesn't have a market because you didn't understand what the need was. You need both. You can't have one without the another."