Today we’d like to introduce you to Tim O’Malley.
So, before we jump into specific questions about the business, why don’t you give us some details about you and your story.
I grew up in Chicago, and as the youngest of seven kids, we were encouraged to work at an early age. At the time, I didn’t understand the concept of an entrepreneur but that is how my career started by delivering papers at 12 years old, then landscaping for people, and eventually working on and selling cars in High School and College. During College I started working for a Chicago-based small Bio-Medical Services Company, we sold and serviced equipment contracts into Hospitals in the Chicago-area.
Shortly after leaving college, I began a 16-year career with Siemens. I started on the technical side of the business, and quickly became a technical specialist and provided training for engineers and clinicians who worked with our intensive care ventilators. This was a small, yet very entrepreneurial division within a global company, so the opportunity to learn a great deal was there for me. Siemens moved me to the Boston area in 1993, where my family and I moved to Topsfield. We have been there ever since.
My daughter who is the youngest of our three children was born here in the Boston-area. While I may still maintain a lot of my Chicago roots (Go Cubs!), Massachusetts has been a wonderful home for so many years. When we moved here we had two young sons and were quickly welcomed into the community. We made a decision that this was where we wanted to plant our roots and raise our children. From then on, I specifically looked for career opportunities that would keep our family in Massachusetts (not always simple in the medical device industry).
After leaving Siemens in 1999, I went to a small pre-revenue medical device company, where I opened up an office in Danvers. That business grew to approximately $8 million in revenues. It was a public company, and when Sarbanes Oxley was introduced and some changes in direction of investors, I left and worked at ZOLL Medical for 5 years. I ran their hospital equipment business, which was focused on Cardiac Resuscitation.
ZOLL is a great company and has incredible technology, however, what you learn is that once a person needs to be resuscitated, their chances of surviving that event is less than 20%. Medicine and the technology within medicine has been primarily reaction based. I kept coming back to the same idea, what if you could avoid a cardiac arrest, and learn and be alerted that a patient was heading in that direction earlier, could the outcomes be improved? The answer is absolutely. This is what brought me to EarlySense, the opportunity to introduce medical technology that will save patient’s lives each and every day.
Since 2012, we have been commercializing EarlySense in the North American market, and have grown the company considerably in the past few years. EarlySense technology allows for a flat sensor to be placed under a mattress of a bed, or in the cushion of a chair and monitors a person’s heart and respiratory rates, as well as body motion. This very sensitive sensor is placed in hospitals, rehab centers, and skilled nursing facilities, and sends signals to the clinical team, alerting them to potentially adverse event developments. With sicker people being sent to non-hospital institutions, this has opened up the market for EarlySense to provide these patient safety tools to be used in settings where traditional monitoring technologies are just too complex.
In the last two years, EarlySense has taken this proven technology to benefit consumers by launching two consumer health-based products. The first is called Live and tracks health and sleep of the aging population. The under-the-mattress monitor provides daily summary reports with a full health and sleep analysis including sleep stages, heart rate, breathing rate, stress level, and movement, plus personalized health tips. It’s an easy and reliable way to track your own health or the health of your loved ones.
The second is our newly launched Percept product, which is designed for couples looking to conceive. Because of the sensitivity of the sensor and algorithms, we are able to determine the best time during ovulation to try and conceive. This personal use product was born out of the extensive clinical work we have done in the hospital and alternate care facilities, and is now available for home use, with accuracy rates which you would see in a professional setting. It is a very exciting time in the world of Medtech.
Ultimately, when weighing career choices, I find myself being drawn to opportunities where a passion and capability to make a difference in people’s lives is at the forefront of the business. Secondly, the entrepreneurial spirit I had as a child taking on two paper routes so I could have twice the chances of winning a new bike in a contest has never left me. As the President of a rapidly growing business, every day is different. There is always a new and exciting challenge to tackle and the reward for tackling these challenges is directly correlated to the businesses success.
Has it been a smooth road?
Looking back at my career, there has been plenty of preparation along the way for me to learn and grow in each position which I was able to enter. At EarlySense we have had to make the market, which is never easy no matter how logical the solution may be. Small upstart companies in their early stages must manage their expenses while trying to commercially grow a business, which is never easy.
As you move from startup to growth, the challenges change. Once sales begin the challenges are more scale related. And along with that path, determining how to retrain employees to help manage growth by mentoring people to move into functional areas which may not be intuitive for them. If we as an organization and I as a leader can do this, the success and patients utilizing our technology will benefit greatly.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with EarlySense – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
As described above, we have developed technology which is used to monitor a person in either a professional setting such as a hospital, rehab or skilled nursing center to avoid adverse events. Additionally, we offer our technology to consumers at home, providing unique insights into windows of time that they otherwise may not get.
I have been fortunate in my career to be involved in medical technologies which have had tremendously positive impacts on people’s lives. Our company gives people tools that are designed to protect people from harm or help them improve their personal lives. We are truly making a difference in people’s lives and that is what gets me up and out of bed every morning.
Contact Info:
- Address: 135 Beaver Street Suite 307 Waltham, MA 02452
- Website: https://www.earlysense.com/
- Phone: (781) 373-3228
- Email: Info.USA@earlysense.com
- Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/earlysensepercept/ ; https://www.instagram.com/EarlySenseLive/
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/EarlySense/ ; https://www.facebook.com/earlysenselive/ ; https://www.facebook.com/EarlySensePercept/
- Twitter: https://twitter.com/EarlySense_Ltd ; https://twitter.com/EarlySenseLive ; https://twitter.com/ESPercept
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