Electronic medical records are still making their way into physicians’ offices, but a South Carolina startup thinks it’s already spotted a missing piece of the technology — video.
CareCam Innovations LLC received a $200,000 investment from SCRA, a Columbia, S.C.-based applied research and commercialization company.
The funding came from SCRA’s SC Launch program, which supports startups.
CareCam is developing an EMR system based on video. The idea came to founder and president Shannon Pierce from her days working as a nurse. Data entry distracts clinicians from patient care, she said.
Pierce declined to provide many details about the company’s technology, and said CareCam, which was founded in 2004, has flown mostly under the radar.
“We are deep in R&D and many steps from commercialization,” she said.
But the based in Greenville, S,C.-based company’s 2009 patent on the method of documenting health records describes the technology as an electronic documentation system consisting of “documentation devices having a digital video recorder directed towards the patient.”
The device will record video and audio information about the care of the patient, categorizing the data and logging it for future reference. That would be a different tack from most EMR offerings on the market, which aim to move paper records to the digital world, but without the audio and video that CareCam proposes.
EMR may eventually replace paper records altogether, but doctors, and likely their patients, will ultimately decide whether a video record is preferable to other formats. CareCam completed its first pilot in December, according to Pierce.