Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler (Part 2)

Grant Kohler: By the time they would get into the medical center, they would be outside that window of treatment for this particular drug. The Department of Neurology was investigating how to treat these patients out in their home communities and treat them fast enough so that they will still be within this three-hour window for this drug to be administered.

We started looking at different technologies. The reality is that the doctors need to be able to see and talk to the patient, and see medical imaging around that patient to make this decision of giving this particular drug to the patient. Conceptually, that’s how it started in the Medical College of Georgia (MCG). This was around 2002. Between 2002 and 2005, we did an alpha project. We

were providing this service to nine hospitals in East Central Georgia with the doctors providing the coverage. I was providing a lot of the IT support around what it took for those hospitals to be a part of this network.

What started to happen was there were some different research papers that were put out there. It started getting out that the doctors at MCG had this solution for treating these patients. It was word of mouth publicity.

In mid-2005, we got a very large request from the State Department of Health in New York asking how they can use our concept and technology in upstate New York to help treat stroke patients that are aren’t getting to the major medical centers in time for treatment. That started us down a course of how do we take this concept and technology that we built and commercialize it. It was a very long process and there were a lot of different mechanisms that we activated inside of the health system here at Georgia to try and commercialize this product. That’s the reason why we turned it into a company. We started getting these outside requests of using this, but we had no way of delivering it to them unless we created a company.

Sramana Mitra: If it’s from the University of Georgia, what were the equity structures and what did you need to do in terms of process to get authorization and what terms did you license the technology under?

Grant Kohler: Just to clarify, there were two entities that were involved. There was the MCG, which is part of the overall Georgia Regents system. Then there was also the hospital. Those are really the two entities that gave us the initial funding to get the project started inside of MCG. The research institution, which would be MCG, actually holds the license for our software because that’s where we developed it – underneath it. Today, Reach operates under a license to use the technology from the Medical College of Georgia.

This segment is part 2 in the series : Building a Healthcare IT Company out of Georgia: Reach Health Founder Grant Kohler
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