Caregility, a medical technology company co-located with Yorktel in Wall Township, is making a huge impact by introducing smart patient rooms and telemedicine systems to healthcare facilities both here and abroad.
The company integrates all types of smart medical devices into customers’ hospital rooms through telemedicine endpoints, thereby reducing nursing burden and contributing to improved patient care. Hybrid care systems also improve productivity, resulting in savings for hospitals that implement them.
NJTech Weekly.com interviewed Ronald Gaboury, CEO of Caregility and Yorktel. Yorktel is a 40-year-old telecommunications systems integrator.
Caregility was spun out of Yorktel. Gaboury noted that Yorktel originally entered the medical device business in 2007 by acquiring a company involved in smart operating rooms. But “this was 2007, and we were relying on another company to transmit video.”
A few years later, a virtual hospital company came to Yorktel and asked if they could build a new telemedicine system that was resilient and could be hung on the wall. Yoketel, known for its integration capabilities, said it was able to handle this mission, which required a difficult configuration. “We did it ourselves, working with a lot of very smart people,” he said.
Gaboury recalled how a customer agreed to purchase a new configuration using first-generation components. “And all of a sudden we were selling under the Yorktel brand, and we went straight into prime time.”
However, the customers for this product were different from Yorktel’s current customers. “It was clinically focused,” he said, and customers continued to give Yoktel feedback by telling them what they needed.
But the product doesn’t make sense as a division of Yorktel, he said, because the company needs to hire people with different types of skill sets. So Caregility was spun out of Yorktel in September 2019 with support from Yorktel’s financial institutions.
Caregility was a true startup at the time. Gaboury said: “We transferred 20 people from Yorktel and now we have over 125 employees. We have a further 50 contract developers both internal and external.”
Caregility’s approach to smart hospital systems builds on its history as a systems integrator. The company has developed APIs to integrate critical medical technologies and software with those of other technology providers, resulting in a single platform that hospitals can use for all types of healthcare delivery workflows. Hospital systems that need these technologies can find them on the Caregility website.
“Go find technology that works with us,” Gaboury said.
The company started in the ICU room business and is now moving into acute virtual nursing. Caregility has developed a “very robust and cost-effective program and new devices” with the goal of being able to deploy the system in every room of the hospital, he said. “Hospitals are finding the budget to do everything they can.”
He explained that it’s like oxygen. The hospital has oxygen installed in every room because patients may need it. Well, we will need cameras and telemedicine in every room to enhance clinical workflow and improve patient care.
He further added: “We’re not looking to replace nurses. We like the nurses, too. They can work in a different way and transfer some of their floor work to other nurses who work virtually. Masu.”
He added that customers in hospital environments are looking for reliability. Caregility is designed so that its systems are self-healing, which is critical for hospital systems, he said. You can’t have 8,000 hospital rooms with systems that constantly break down.
Gaboury said the company’s business has been growing explosively and pointed out that the company missed an opportunity to sell right away after spinning off Caregility. He’s grateful he didn’t take up the offer, which was quite lucrative. At that time, he already had a hunch that Caregility had the potential to be even better.
As a side note, we asked Gaboury how he copes with running a startup while serving as CEO of Yorktel. He said Yorktel is a 40-year-old company and has well-developed systems. While some care is needed, the real challenge is to ensure Caregility is set up for future growth.
Gaboury spoke about the customer pipeline and said the business is well-positioned to continue its rapid growth. If not already. ”
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Visit Caregility at caregility.com or call 732-440-7810.
Contact Yorktel at yorktel.com or call 732-413-6000.
