Perhaps the worst day of RN Lindsey Roddy’s nursing career came seven years ago when a Milwaukee patient’s life support line started to pull out of his neck when it snagged on some bedside equipment, causing him to go quicky downhill.
The near-fatal mishap stuck with Roddy. U.S. patients suffer 19 million “device dislodgements” a year – why weren’t ICU nurses equipped with more than tubes and tape?
She teamed up with UW-Milwaukee’s Prototyping Center (an unheralded maker’s paradise) and invented the SecureMove-TLC, a simple armband with eight slots for medical tubes: IV lines, catheters, that kind of stuff. It’s a bit like the cord organizer behind your TV or computer desk.
Now the idea is a Wauwatosa-based startup, RoddyMedical. After going through the MedTech Accelerator program hosted by Mayo Clinic and Arizona State University this spring, Roddy is working to break into the oft-impenetrable medical equipment market, and the device is now used in 13 hospitals in five different states.
“We will not stop until this is the standard of patient care, much like seatbelts in cars,” says Kyle Jansson, RoddyMedical’s director of engineering.
