CleveMed
Company: CleveMed
Company Description: CleveMed is developing and pioneering the use of novel wireless monitoring systems for high growth neurology and rehabilitation applications, including brain monitoring, sleep disorders and movement disorders. Through these innovations, CleveMed has developed a growing range of products that address the needs of the medical, research and academic communities.
Nomination Category: Individual Awards Categories
Nomination Sub Category: Best Product Developer
Nomination Title: Craig Frederick, Software Engineering Manager
1. Tell the story about what this nominee achieved in the past year (up to 500 words). Focus on specific accomplishments, and relate these accomplishments to past performance or industry norms. Be sure to mention obstacles overcome, innovations or discoveries made, and outcomes:
Obstructive Sleep Apnea (OSA) is a sleep disorder that affects millions of
people in the United States, many of whom remain undiagnosed. Most sleep
disorders testing occurs in a sleep lab, so that the study is attended by a
technologist that monitors the patient’s polysomnography (PSG) signals
throughout the night from another room in the sleep lab. Though this method is
effective for many patients, the sleep lab setting can be uncomfortable or even
impractical for a subset of the patient population such as the elderly, obese,
infants and young children, and those suffering from disorders that cause
chronic pain. On the contrary, the home offers a more natural environment for
sleep evaluation, ensuring better sleep and likely a more accurate diagnosis.
Because past home testing methods have been unattended, though, without the
supervision of a sleep technologist, their lower reliability has been viewed as
a problem, causing health insurance payers to refrain from reimbursing for
studies outside of the sleep lab. As a result, there has been a long-standing
debate regarding appropriate settings for testing. Finally, after years of
debate, the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) is reviewing the
issue. Most often, private insurers follow CMS’s lead regarding reimbursement,
so the entire industry landscape could change drastically if the decision is
made in favor or home study reimbursement.
Unlike most in the industry in 2003, Craig Frederick, Software Engineering
Manager at CleveMed, realized that it should be possible to develop a
data “gateway” that can efficiently transmit PSG data between the patient’s
home and a remote monitoring site thus offering first-of-a-kind supervised home
sleep assessment. As a result, Frederick and his team developed the Virtually
Attended Home Polysomnography system. This system allows patients to be tested in their homes, as well as nontraditional settings such as nursing homes or hospital rooms, while still having the reliability of attended in-lab testing.
The data “gateway” is an easy to operate compact package that can be carried by
the patient and houses everything needed for real time monitoring, including a
laptop with cell phone connectivity and miniature infrared video camera.
The “gateway” transmits data over the cell phone internet connection using
optimized and special communication schemes developed by Frederick and his
team. Data and video are monitored in real-time by a sleep technologist that
can be located almost anywhere in the world. The technology is witnessing an
overwhelmingly enthusiastic response from many physicians interested in testing
their home-bound patients or their pediatric patients. Collaboration with some
of these physicians is underway including testing of Fibromyalgia patients
whose chronic pain prevents them from traveling to a sleep laboratory for
evaluation.
2. List hyperlinks to any online news stories, press releases, or other documents that support the claims made in the section above. IMPORTANT: Begin each link with http://, and enclose each link in square brackets; for example, [http://www.youraddress.com]:
http://www.sleepreviewmag.com/podcast.asp
http://www.clevemed.com/pdfs/PR_Virtually_Attended_Sleep_Study.pdf
http://www.clevemed.com/pdfs/SleepReview_CutCord.pdf
http://www.clevemed.com/pdfs/presurgical_inpatient_NIH_grant_01_2007.pdf
http://www.clevemed.com/pdfs/SleepDT_Kayyali_profile_102006.pdf
http://www.clevemed.com/pdfs/WirelessPolysomnography1.pdf
3. Provide a brief (up to 100 words) biography about the nominee:
Craig Frederick received his BS in Computer Engineering from Penn State
University in 1998. He began working for CleveMed in 1999 as a Software
Engineer and was quickly promoted. He is now the Software Engineering
Manager. In this position, he has not only overseen software development for a
wide array of products, but he has performed much of the development himself,
and has served as product manager for some of the products due to his extensive
understanding of the product markets.