Sickbay Sessions: Reimagining Patient Monitoring
Replay the Live Webinar Recorded April 17, 2025: Unlocking Critical Data: The Mission & Vision Behind Sickbay
This exclusive webinar is tailored for healthcare leaders, where we pull back the curtain on the story behind Medical Informatics Corp. (MIC) and the groundbreaking Sickbay Clinical Platform.
In this candid and insightful session, Emma shares the journey that led to the founding of MIC—and the intentional decisions that have made Sickbay one of the most scalable and innovative platforms in modern patient monitoring.
You’ll gain a front-row view into:
- The real problems MIC set out to solve—scaling, visibility, and access to critical patient data
- Why traditional solutions fall short, and how Sickbay redefines integration and usability
- How leading health systems are improving outcomes while reducing costs through this platform
- What’s next for virtual care and predictive analyticsI in patient monitoring
This is not a product pitch. It’s a story about solving hard problems in healthcare for every patient, everywhere, with actionable data.
This webinar was originally presented: April 17, 11:30 AM CST. Speaker is Emma Fauss, PhD – Co-founder & CEO, MIC
Podcast Transcription: Sickbay Sessions 1
Jennifer: Thank you for joining us today. I’m Jennifer Lazars, Director of Marketing for Medical Informatics Corp. We’re thrilled to bring you the first episode of Sickbay Sessions where we’re exploring how cutting-edge technology is revolutionizing bedside and remote patient monitoring, optimizing clinical workflows, and closing the data gap in healthcare. Each session features an industry expert or innovator to discuss the latest industry advancements and solutions throughout the session. Today, if you have a question, please feel free to enter it into the Q and A window which you can find down at the bottom of the screen, there’s also a chat feature, and we’ll get to your questions at the end of our conversation here at Medical Informatics Corp, or as you’ll hear me also call it, MIC, we are proud to deliver next generation technologies to unify patient monitoring workflows for healthcare systems. Our focus is every patient everywhere, monitored by the people who care, powered by actionable data, joining me today in a very important conversation about that actionable data, particularly unlocking critical care data, and to share some insights about the past, present and future of MIC is our co-founder and CEO, Emma Fauss, since joining, not even just joining. Since founding MIC in 2010 Emma has been the driving force behind the company’s vision to revolutionize health care through innovative data solutions. Emma holds a PhD in electrical and computer engineering from the University of Virginia, an MBA with a concentration in Healthcare from Rice University and a Bachelor of Engineering in chemical engineering from the Cooper Union. Emma, thank you for taking the time to join me today.
Emma: Thank you for having me.
Jennifer: Excellent. So, to get us started, would you tell us a little bit about your background and how you found yourself invading in the healthcare space?
Emma: Well, I think there’s sort of two parts. One, I grew up around healthcare providers. I have a number of doctors in my family, and that sort of instilled in me, in an early age, this idea of having to be on call and serve those who are in a vulnerable situation, and just to having to step up like whether or not you felt like it, right? So, I think that was this idea of service that was really important. And then I think as I got older, and I started looking at like, hey, what am I going to go? Do you know, like, where is my role in the world? I very much got pulled into engineering and with this sort of, like, really passion, really strong passion around solving problems that ultimately impact people. And I thought that that was something that one interests me. And it was just like, you know, it was the core of, sort of my curiosity and my desire to go fix hard things, right?
Jennifer: And your passion for solving problems that impact people. Here we are, 10 years later at MIT, it definitely makes a difference. So I said, 10 years later, can you tell us about how you and our co-founder, Craig Rusin, came up with the idea for the company, MIC, Medical Informatics Corp. And would you talk about, were there any specific unmet industry needs or gaps that you’ve sought to address?
Emma: Yeah. So I met Craig back when I was doing my PhD in graduate school. And it was a really interesting intersection where he was finishing his PhD in Chemical Engineering in an area, and it’s gonna get a little nerdy, called non nonlinear dynamics. And this is essentially a set of mathematics and equations that govern the interaction between sort of systems that oscillate and interact with each other of similar elements. So, like, a good example would be like brain cells, neurons, heart cells. Physiology and healthcare is one of the few places you can apply that kind of math. And he was pulled into a group that was trying to look at, how do we protect imminent catastrophic failure or deterioration in patients by looking at the interaction of their physiology. And he would start to, like, try to get the data from the different devices. And they would talk to people around the world doing this. And I would show up at his lab, and I would often see this sort of line of doctors out the door, and I’d be like, “Craig, what’s going on?” And he’d be like, “Well, turns out that a lot of these practicing physicians don’t really have a good clarity of this data.” There’s a lot of gaps in what they need to look at to understand what’s happening with their patients. I think when you think about like your EHR and your medical records, you people don’t realize that that’s really sort of a transactional like, you know, dictated, you know, record of what happened in these points of time. It’s not sort of that continuous information that happened over the trajectory of that patient, you know, going up or down. And so, not only did these clinicians have this gap in data. But then they were trying, they wanted to understand why things were going in the direction they were, and if they could develop these things, or predictors, or indicators that things were going in that direction so they could intervene and protect, for instance, the heart before an arrest. And that led us to sort of really start to ask some questions as engineers, curious engineers like, “hey, it seems like people are trying to do stuff with this data. There is something there. Is something there. There’s enough work out there to suggest that this is a place where innovation can happen.” But there were a lot of barriers to innovation. You didn’t have access to the data. People would often roll around or make their homegrown carts and roll it around for 10 years to collect enough data to build something. Once you built something and validated in a peer-reviewed journal, you there was no, like, easy way to get that back into clinical practice in a safe and effective, scalable way. And so we realized, like, “hey, if we can shorten the distance between idea and concept to actually deployment of something clinical, that would be a profound shift in the way patient monitoring evolved and the speed at which it which it could evolve.” And we there’s this concept called Blue Ocean, and we were very much like, “hey, if we fix this and make it cheaper and faster to develop innovation in the space, we can open this blue ocean of opportunity for not just us, but for a whole host of technologies and techniques to get ahead of risk with patients.” So that was really the foundation. And I think it’s actually a very special thing. I think you look at a lot of other companies, and they start with usually one problem, and they expand from there. We really looked at this as a way to disrupt a market, and a thing that is very critical to every experience in a hospital when you’re going in and being monitored, right? Because in today’s world, if you’re going to a hospital, you’re generally monitored because you’re sick, right? And that’s an important part of that data infrastructure that’s needed to treat you and get you out of that hospital safely and in the fastest way possible. That’s effective and safe, right? So that’s, that’s sort of the idea of where Sickbay came from. And you know how we got into this, and how we’ve been very intentional from the beginning.
Jennifer: You know, you’ve taught you said a couple things that I think are really interesting, and you talked about the speed with which you could deliver the data and the intentionality. So my next question for you, based off of those things, is, can you talk about the founding principles or the pillars that you put in place to drive them?
Emma: Yeah, again, being very fortunate of being like the founder and growing this business to where it is today. There are different things, these pillars that have sort of come up, that have informed the people we hire, the way we think about our technology. The first one we that we really started with in the core, coming from, like a researchers or quality standpoint, was the concept of data and truth, and so it’s always been very fundamentally important to us to collect the highest fidelity data at the source and not misrepresent that so you collect the raw data, you store that raw data in perpetuity, and then it’s your downstream interpretations or analysis of that data that then put the filters or do things to it. In other words, some people’s noise can be some people’s signals, depending on what you’re trying to do, whether it’s an operational evaluation or a clinical evaluation or something like that. So that’s really important, that we take care of that data and data across different devices and systems, right? That those things are time-synchronized correctly. So again, your, you know, your respiration rate lines up with your heart rate appropriately, just the way it would in real life. I think another pillar is innovation, and you probably glean that from our the story of, you know, how MIC started, part of the core of what we were trying to do is unlock innovation and so that you could reimagine patient monitoring, what that means for us on a daily basis, or how we think about problems, is, how do we remove the friction and the barriers to that innovation happening? A lot of our clients will use our analytics tools. We just had a client that we onboarded the other week, and their comment was one of quite surprised. They were like, in a matter of minutes, they were up, able to start doing their research, and they were like, we just haven’t experienced this kind of frictionless research before that can profoundly change how we think about physiology and way we treat our patients in contrast right before. And we hear this from a lot of our other potential clients, it’s like, “Hey, I make a data request, and it can take me six months to get that data request, and if I made that data request wrong, I have to wait another six months to get that like that.” That’s a barrier to innovation. It’s a barrier to advancing the state of the art. So again, removing those barriers to innovation, wherever we identify them, and continue to iterate on that. That’s key to what we do. Third, usability we have. Another thought process here, where it’s like, if you make something beautiful intuitive to use, that’s the way people are going to use a product and a workflow. And so if you want compliance, if you want to people to do the right thing, you make the right thing easy and intuitive. And so that is built into way the a lot of the ways we look at our product, removing that friction points so that people can have a seamless experience and one that’s compliant and auditable, and all those things that meet those sort of regulatory and legal requirements that institutions have when they look at systems, and that, especially around health data. And then finally, I think the fourth pillar is mission, right? We are an intentional company, intentional culture. We couldn’t do this without the amazing team we have. It’s we. There’s a true focus around service, like we view very much of our role as one supporting the clinicians that are on the front lines at the bedside, right? We’re there to support them do operating at the highest level of their license, right? And so that’s really embedded into who we are and who we serve.
Jennifer: Well, I appreciate that. MIC’s focus is service-driven driven as an employee of the company, I think it helps us to organize and orient. You know, it’s a compass for us about who we’re serving, right? We talked about every patient everywhere, monitored by people who care. Can you talk about where MIC is today? Like, what do you see us doing with the product Sickbay, and the company?
Emma: There are so many things I’m excited about, and so many things we could talk about. I think there’s the things that come to mind, first and foremost, just sort of level setting, right? Going back to sort of that data concept, right, our clients have now some of the largest physiological data sets in the world in their own infrastructures, right? We’ve helped collect and maintain this data for them so that they can apply to their own AI data lakes, that they can develop their AI model generation with this type of data that really has not been accessible before, it’s at scale, or with a variety of different devices across all the care areas, right? That sort of continuity of care being carried through there. And it’s also informing patient care, right? Like it’s profoundly shifting the way people are thinking about like filling those gaps in their everyday practice of care, to remove patient risk, to get ahead of things, to improve communication across the care team. There’s just this, this rich data set that’s now easily accessible in their normal workflow, is truly important. I think, when we if we look at first, that sort of academic and both academic and quality side, because you’re not going to do research unless it’s going to impact, like the clinical side, that’s the reason you’re doing that research. But we’re pushing the edge of what’s possible. If you just looked at our website, you would see over 140 peer-reviewed publications. These are not all our publications. These are people using Sickbay to show what can be done. There’s approaches and innovations with, you know, advanced human dynamics monitoring, advanced neuro critical care monitoring, a lot of different ways. People are using this data to sort of look at how we treat patients and understand patients better or different physiologies Better is truly been wonderful, and they’re doing it at a scale that, again, wasn’t possible when you had one a car rolling around and recording things, you just weren’t getting the volume or getting the volume or the statistical significantly cohorts that were going to, you know, move the state of the art, right? So now we’re able to enable that, I think, a good example of sort of, and I’ve talked about this before, you know, there’s this concept of a good example of research that is pushing the possible is around like auto regulation. While auto regulation has been an established kind of concept in academics for a while, it’s this idea that your brain likes a constant blood flow. If you get too much blood, you get burst vessels. If you get too little, you can have parts of the brain die. So you like to keep that optimal blood flow, and in traumatic brain injury patients, as well as like cardiac bypass patients, this is something that has to be managed appropriately, or you can get more brain injury today. There’s sort of guidelines, but what’s true is that that that ideal target range for an individual might change over time, and it’s different from me and you right. So going to the next level of being able to monitor a patient in real time, understand their physiology, and then adjust that target range for them in real time is quite a profound shift in how you think about monitoring patients and but to do this, you effectively need time synchronized data. Yeah, truthful data of like blood pressure waveforms combined with another data source, like, for instance, in NIRS device waveform, those things come together in a calculation that then present. What’s that ideal blood pressure you have to manage to making it very practical to actually use as a real time tool. And while this is not commercially available today. It is definitely something that a lot of people using Sickbay are researching and researching for a lot of different applications too, like a wide swath of different kinds of patients. And it’s a very it’s very encouraging to see, because it’s it could truly be profound at managing these type of patients in the future, and then sort of where I wanted to land on the clinical side is that we’re also seeing this sort of profound shift in the way that data is being used daily for just clinical care. We talked about usability as being one of those pillars. I want to give you an example of like, where we see this and it’s, it’s very common for us to deploy Sickbay new unit or a new facility, and it’s turned on, and within 24 hours to a, you know, few days, we’re usually getting stories back about how we helped save a life, or we transformed the way they think about the care They’re delivering. And example of this would be, we had just turn Sickbay on in an area, an ICU, an or situation, and a patient unfortunately coded. And in traditionally, what happens is, you know, if you’re moving a patient from an ICU to an or and you discharge them from the monitor and they’ll put them in the OR is all that data on the monitor disappears, and so they’re in the or trying to resuscitate the patient, and they’re asking, was this a was this caused because of a cardiac issue or respiratory issue? We can’t tell because we don’t have the data now, they recognized that they had just gotten Sickbay and they had just gotten Sickbay training, and so they were actually actively having us on the phone and be like, can we get this for this patient? It was deleted off the monitor. How do we get within under a minute, they were able within their EHR environment to navigate to Sickbay and look at what happened to that patient and make a determination of how they needed to proceed based on that code event in real time. And I don’t think there’s many products you can sort of say that they give that example right where it’s so user friendly that under a high stress stakes, you know, situation with new users and a new environment, they just naturally are able to pick it up and adopt it and save a life, right? Yeah, I think that’s that, to me, gets me really excited. And the the continuation of stories and more stories we hear about that always invigorates us and gets us really excited.
Jennifer: Well, talking about the stories you hear and things like that, would you share a little bit about, kind of, some of the use cases of Sickbay, and what I mean by use cases is not individualized, but one of the things that makes Sickbay unique is there’s a lot of things that it can do. You’ve talked about it clinically. You’ve talked about it research. You know, would you talk about what kind of remote monitoring options exist, what kind of services and data that are collected in Sickbay might exist for executives or other leaders at the hospital, from historical standpoint, would you go over kind of, what is that picture look like when it comes to Sickbay in the market?
Emma: Yeah, I think that is one thing, you know, if what’s interesting is that when you, if you’re an organization, like looking at patient monitoring, I think traditionally, the view has been, patient monitoring is about a box, and I get a box and it has a set of features, and that I checked off the, you know, monitoring, you know, sort of checklist, right? And I, like, got my monitors, great. The problem is, is you combine looking at, like, the staffing challenges we have, the problems we have in revenue recognition, a whole host of different, you know, quality, sometimes there’s legal liability, things you need to address, right? If you sort of go back all and you trace it back to the source and root cause analysis, you’re like, hey, you know, having information about what happened to that patient becomes really important. And a lot of the sort of things out there in the market, they don’t, they don’t scale, they don’t integrate across different types of modalities. They don’t provide access on demand. You know, they don’t deliver on, they don’t always deliver on the promises that they make. Right? There’s sort of feature that. So you have all these sort of things. So what happens when you start to shift the paradigm and say, Hey, monitoring is about continuity of capturing what happens that patient as they enter the hospital, to when they leave the hospital, when you start to have that historical arc and awareness on that level you’re able to, like understand this is what happened when they came into the ED, this is what happened when they went to the or this is what happened when they went into a. Um the ICU, to step down right and and not just like what was in the EHR, but truly a second by second recording and integration of what happened from the all of the devices that they were connected to. That transforms the way we start to think about how we can apply that. So when you talk about who else uses it, very because, like, clearly your bedside nursing staff and your physicians who are rounding will be able to use that data. But you also start to think about, how can you accelerate virtual care programs, diversify those virtual care programs to start to think bigger and broader of standardizing care practices across your organization. How can quality use it to track and mass how you’re applying certain protocols or effective strategies around certain quality metric programs that you might have. This all becomes unlocked when you start to have a foundation of in a source of truth, of data, second to second, from that entire engagement, from a client, you know, a patient in the organization. So I think that’s really important. So I think, you know, if executives could take one thing away from this conversation, it’d be like you need to start to rethink about patient monitoring in general, as it’s not just a box problem. It’s about creating a core set of foundational technologies and integrations in your organization, and a platform for you to build off of and address issues you have, from again, rev cycle to clinical ops applications for the clinical staff to dealing with your quality initiatives as well, to researchers and AI, right? You know, there’s a good, yeah, I do think there’s one other thing I just I did want to expand on this a little bit, which is the going of where monitoring is going right. Because I think, again, going away from the box concept, we need to start thinking about expanding that definition of what monitoring is. It includes your EHR workflow and your labs and your, you know, your labs and medications and the things you’re doing to that patient. It includes all the devices that are connected to them. It includes the video systems you might be you know, you starting to integrate into your workflows, right that allow that two way communication with both the patient, their family and the care teams in the room, and it includes also the AI and the risk going analytics that you want to use to monitor and maintain that maintain a certain expectation around risk across your organization at scale. So again, broaden that idea of what monitoring actually becomes.
Jennifer: Something you just said, I think, is a really, I want to tie back to, and I want to tie it back to one of the one or two of the pillars you talked about, you know, you you’ve mentioned thinking patient monitoring literally outside the box, outside of adding another device, right? You’ve talked about patient monitoring and scalability and different use cases, kind of across an entire hospital system. What can you tell me that executives across other hospital systems that we’ve worked with existing clients, what has been their feedback with regard to, you know, the Sickbay and Medical Informatics Corp model? I mean, we’ve been around for 10 years. There’s gotta be a little bit of feedback to that they’ve given you about, not only what are we doing, but where do they think we could be going to.
Emma: No, I think, I think that’s an interesting question. You know, we have a lot of strong executive support at our sites, and I think there’s a few things that sort of probably stand out from comments that I’m very proud of, like, again, we take a lot of pride in, you know, coming from the sort of strong technical background where we build things that work and we deliver on our promises. So we will often get the response of, hey, out of all my clinical applications, you guys are my favorite, because you’re always responsive if there ever is any issue, or you’re right there with us to help us through, and you’re it’s just reliable. You do what you say you’re going to do, and you deliver, and you continue to evolve and meet us where we need to be. I think that’s that’s really amazing. And for me, it’s like, as an engineer, I’m, like, actually surprised that’s abnormal, like that people have to suffer through like bad experiences with things, but it is so critical when you start talking about feeling the confidence to empower your care teams to actually build a foundation that you can rely on, not just now, but as you build things in the future and extend those capabilities, which is going to be even more important continuing with the sort of staffing problems that we’re seeing. I think the other thing you would, you would find, is that that we, we are also pressing and always getting institutions to question, you know, what monitoring of the future could be, right? Like, I think we’ve, we’ve. Challenge those traditional models a little bit, and, you know, worked with our organizations to push for greater integrations across the different monitoring modalities. So it’s about making monitoring seamless integration into the EHR and seamless integration of those analytics, so that the right alerts are going to the right people. There’s a lot of complexity in this, and we make it look very simple, but it is not. It is not a simple this is not a simple problem in terms of approaching and it’s something that I’m proud that we’ve been able to simplify for our clients in a way that’s something that’s an evolution, that they can evolve over time.
Jennifer: Well, I agree, and I’m proud, too. I mean, I’m proud to work here, and it’s, it’s exciting to be at this point in this company’s history. I’ve been here for a few years now, and to hear what you’re saying is great as an employee, but also somebody we talk about that pillar of service and tying it all together and that scalability, it’s really exciting. You know, you don’t want to be at the behind a trend, you want to be in front of it. So with that, I want to thank you for taking the time out of your busy schedule today to join us, and I want to thank those of you who’ve been putting questions in the chat. If you have to scoot, I’m going to let you know we’re going to answer these questions. This recording will be available if you’ve registered on demand, but if for some reason, we don’t get to your question while we’re here having the rest of this conversation, please don’t hesitate to visit us at sickbay.com. You also heard at the top of the call that this is the first of the Sickbay sessions. So please visit our website or check out our LinkedIn for the information on our second Sickbay Session taking place May 22 it is titled, Patient Monitoring: Data is Actionable, Data Saving Lives Bit by Bit. So, really continuing the trend about what is that data going to do for you and your hospital system? So yeah, so we’re going to take some time right now to answer some questions, and we’ll go from there. So thank you so much. Okay. Sorry about that. All of a sudden, my camera just goofy. There we go. Excellent, Emma, thank you so much for everything we’ve been talking about we did get let’s kick off with our first question. How did you gain the trust of early adopters of Sickbay. Now it’s new technology. There’s a lot of startups right now in the industry, and I know we’ve been around 10 years, but 10 years ago, how did you get that initial buy in?
Emma: Wow, that’s going back a while. So it is interesting when you’re a small company and you’re trying to engage these large organizations that are dealing with, you know, behemoth vendors. They’re trying to engage and be innovative. There’s, there’s a few different parts of that, right? And in our case, we were lucky enough to be given a chance to sort of do a bake off. So we were being put up against some of the big industry players with a particular problem set that a hospital system had. And I think the thing that stood out was that we just executed. So we met the customer where they were, and we delivered on what we said we were going to deliver. And it turns out the bigger player that we were competing against actually kind of fell flat. So we got the attention of that organization sort of a really meaningful way, and we’re we were able to expand that relationship out to do bigger and better things with where the product was developing and going, and that just enabled trust. So I think it does take trust on both sides, and you need to be able to be open and flexible to work with smaller vendors. But I think if you you meet them where they are, and then they can meet you where you are, and you can collaborate together and keep those lines of open communication, and then that teammate, that team that you’re working with, is executing that is a good sign that you know you can continue to innovate with them.
Jennifer: And I think to what you’re saying that actually really relates to this other question we got here. You’re talking about the Bake Off in that level of trust and communication. So with that, how did you validate the direction the company was taking?
Emma: So a lot of our design principles or build principles have always been about being close to the problem and the users. I think, you know, sometimes people design things in the abstract. We were sort of of the entrepreneurial mindset of minimum viable product, listen and interview and talk to your users, understand their problems and then get that feedback. So while we didn’t necessarily have the resources early on to have a lot of like clinical people on our team, we were embedded in our partner organizations, talking to the users, talking to the different layers of stakeholders that were involved in any particular problem set, and we really were able to then synthesize those perspectives in terms of creating. A set of requirements, a set of goals and objectives for our initial, you know, solutions that we were offering, and I think that’s really still important for us today. I mean, I think you see this, if you’re one of our customers, there’s this sort of consent desire on our end to engage with people at the front lines and continue to filter that feedback back, and it is actually something we’ve scaled very successfully as we’ve grown the business. So when we’re doing our roadmap, we’re not doing it independently of our customers. We are actually actively seeking participation from different stakeholders and those organizations to then drive how we’re prioritizing what’s needed for our existing products and for future products.
Jennifer: I think you actually just did a two for one deal. Because our next question is, how did the company align on early product direction? And I think you’re, you’re hitting on that. Am I correct that you’re talking about, it’s the interaction with the customer.
Emma: Yeah, I do think there is something special that we do in addition to just listening to feedback, though, that’s a little bit different than what I’ve seen elsewhere, which is when we design solutions or workflows, we’re typically trying to gather those requirements, abstract them, and then build a generalized solution. Why is that important? Because if I too narrowly scope a build or a feature set on one or two voices, then I’m not able to capture the full breadth of the capability of what we’re actually offering. So I think especially if you look at any of our core, you know, applications that get used, like Sickbay, any of the analytics or different views that get put onto, like PatMon or something like that. The reason why we can do that quickly, the reason why we can deploy such various different workflows and augment different things for different user groups is because we’ve built that infrastructure in a way that is scalable, and we’ve thought about those core features that need to be extended into these different areas. I don’t know if that’s 100% like if everybody captures that idea and entirely, but it is, is something I think we take a lot of pride in, that we’re building not just one-offs, but we’re building scalable infrastructure that allows us to grow and build on well.
Jennifer: And I think I don’t see any additional questions. So I want to tie this back to, you know, our mission vision, which is we’re creating something that’s for every patient everywhere, monitored by people who care, powered by actionable data. And I think you’ve really talked a lot today about how we’re doing that. And I want to just remind everybody, May 22 we’re going to talk about the next steps for that data and what it can do for you. This video again, just a reminder, we’re going to have this on demand, so tell your friends, and I really appreciate everybody taking the time today to listen to where we’ve come from, and I look forward to seeing you in our next one. And Emma, thank you again. I hope you have a wonderful afternoon, everybody.
Emma: Thanks, for having me.
