To the untrained eye, it looked like Dana Capocaccia was just watching two, thin lines dance across a huge computer monitor.

But he spent years as a trauma nurse in Memphis and knew the lines were, basically, nerve readings from a patient during spinal surgery. If the lines were steady, all was well. If they jumped erratically, the surgeon had turned a screw just a bit too far.

Photo by Mike Maple
Buy this photo »

StatLink-MD remotely monitors surgeries and reads medical tests for physicians across the country. CEO Dana Capocaccia demonstrates how a typical screen looks.

Capocaccia was in his Memphis office on Park but the patient and the surgeon most definitely were not. And yet, “it doesn’t get anymore real than this,” Capocaccia said, knowing that the dancing lines were from a real surgery happening at that very moment.

This kind of medical monitoring is the heart of Capocaccia’s company, StatLink, of which he is president and CEO. The company’s physicians and technicians remotely read medical tests and monitor surgeries for doctors all over the U.S. and Puerto Rico.

Primary care doctors will hire StatLink to review tests, sometimes to determine whether a patient needs to see a specialist. Surgeons will hire StatLink’s specialists — like neurologists or cardiologists — as a second set of professional eyes on their surgeries. These services can go a long way defend physicians against liability claims, Capocaccia said, though their main aims is to produce better outcomes for patients.

StatLink staffers now work in offices in Memphis and Texas in Houston, Pasadena and Dallas.

But by year’s end, Memphis will be the company’s new corporate headquarters and all of those offices will be consolidated to here to employ 20 to 35 people.

“Memphis is my hometown and it is important to me to give back to it and the medical community,” Capocaccia said. “Also, Memphis is trying to expand its offering of medical advancing companies and this is just another arm of that.”

He said he’s now looking for office space between Wolf River Parkway and Collierville.

Capocaccia helped found StatLink two years ago. The company started as a telehealth neurology practice in 1976 by Houston neurologist Dr. Meyer L. Proler.

Telehealth is, basically, remote health care, whether a doctor picks up a phone, looks at patient charts online or sees a patient via teleconference. While much of the technologies and protocols used in telehealth today were born in research settings like universities, the private sector is catching up.

Richard Kuebler, department head of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center Telehealth Network, said he’s watched the annual telehealth trade show double and triple in the past two years.

“Private companies like StatLink have found ways to use telehealth technology in business,” Kuebler said. “It’s encouraging to see the private sector make more aggressive moves in telehealth because it shows it’s a viable financial model and one that works.”

StatLink is privately held and Capocaccia would only define it as a “multi-multi-million-dollar enterprise” and one that grew 100 percent last year.

StatLink offers monitoring, which costs about $2,500 for each three- to four-hour session, but it also offers physicians raw data, results and billing on an encrypted digital system.

The company is also now polishing up new software in India this year. After beta testing later this year, Capocaccia said he hopes the business management software will be rolled out next year.

– Toby Sells: 529-2742

The details

StatLink: Interprets, supervises and interprets over 90,000 cases annually. Also offers Med DataLink, an electronic medical record.

Current headquarters: Pasadena, Texas

Phone: (888) 283-5023

On the Web: www.statlinkmd.com

Similar Posts:

Share