Communicore
A STRATEGIC COMMUNICATIONS ORGANIZATION SPECIALIZING IN ACCELERATING THE ADOPTION OF NEW TECHNOLOGY.
Susan Meister
FOUNDER
Susan Meister is widely recognized as an expert on engineering change in the practice of many specialties of medicine. She has since widened her interests to other areas of person-centered care, especially those that include at-risk populations.
She founded Commmunicore in 1984 with a focus on accelerating adoption of new technologies that enhance the safety, efficacy, and economics of healthcare. Success in these areas involves knowledge of the complex mechanisms -- academic, social, technical, philosophical - that underlie shifts in the status quo. Having built alliances with powerful opinion leaders in a number of constituencies involved in the decision to replace the long-accepted for the new, she is the strategist behind some of the most important changes in standards of care that have positively impacted millions of patients.
A Barnard College/Columbia University trained journalist, she began her career as an editor and organizer of international medical congresses at the Excerpta Medica Foundation, now a unit of Elsevier, the world’s largest international medical publisher. From there she founded her own organization dedicated to professional education in multiple areas of medicine with emphasis - unique at the time - on interdisciplinary communication.
Wishing to supplement her entrepreneurial experience with the view from the corporate side, she held senior communications positions at Revlon Healthcare, Allergan, the Edwards Division of American Hospital Supply Corporation, and Burson Marsteller, the last as leader of their West Coast medical technology division. There she honed her skills as an issue management innovator at the intersection of public policy and clinical medicine.
In addition to her work as founder of Communicore, she has also served on the Board of Trustees of the University of California School of Medicine, Irvine, and continues to identify significant challenges that can be solved or ameliorated by emerging technology. Her work in forming and leading expert consensus groups who have the will and the power to alter the status quo, has contributed to Communicore being recognized by the New York Times as a third-party source of some of their most important technology stories.
Working now in allied fields, her efforts are presently directed to those whose lives could be transformed by the deployment of new technology, augmented by the innovative use of scarce human resources.
Recognizing the value of technology in enhancing the connectivity, inclusion, and personal freedom of people with intellectual disability and/or developmental disabilities, why isn’t it utilized more often in service delivery?
Worldwide adoption of pulse oximetry
For years, too many healthy anesthetized patients died as a result of undetected hypoxemia --or lack of oxygen in the blood --during surgery. At the time, physicians detected this condition by taking an arterial blood sample and literally running it down to the hospital lab where the results were often received too late for intervention.
Fortunately a new technology -- noninvasive and instantaneous -- had been invented that could detect hypoxemia via a sensor that literally detected in real time what portion of the blood was blue (oxygenated), and which was red (non-oxygenated). As is common whenever something new arrives on the scene that requires a shift in practice, there was significant resistance to it. Organized by Communicore, world leaders in anesthesia were brought together where they worked as a unified force to formulate a new standard of care while at the same time launching the worldwide patient safety movement.
Publishing in leading international journals, these experts transformed patient care, first in the operating room, then throughout the hospital environment (the post-anesthesia care unit, the ICU, Labor and Delivery, and the General Care floor). Pulse oximetry is now universally used in medical and dental offices, and its presence is now as common in the home as a thermometer. Millions of lives have been saved by this innovation.
Public Health Breakthrough in the Management of Sudden Cardiac Arrest
In another time, people suffering from sudden cardiac arrest would survive only if EMTs arrived at the scene and were able to resuscitate them within a short period of time so they would emerge alive and without compromised brain function. At one time, the mortality statistics from this devastating problem were unacceptably bad, until the invention of a technology innovation known as a “smart defibrillator.
With this device, anyone witnessing a cardiac arrest could use it to guide them through the process of defibrillation, or administering a dose of electric current to the heart to restore a normal heartbeat. A revolution that would save thousands of lives, it was at first resisted by specialists who believed that shocking the heart by an untrained bystander could cause harm.
Communicore, inventing the term “public access defibrillation,” was successful in gaining the support of constituencies that believed that such an intervention was the answer to the devastating consequences of cardiac arrest unattended by trained personnel. In a multi-year campaign, this public support eventually led to the placement of smart defibrillators in health clubs, on airlines, in airports, and even in the homes of at-risk individuals. (Communicore produced the first training video for United Airlines.) Deaths from cardiac arrests have declined markedly since the wide adoption of smart defibrillators.
Early Identification of Hearing Impairment in Infants
It has been recognized that an estimated ten percent of babies born in the U.S. have some degree of hearing deficiency, without a risk factor necessarily present. If this deficiency is not recognized within 18 months, the child loses the ability to develop language.
This is not only a human problem, it is an economic problem, since these children are consigned to expensive special education programs that prevent them from being mainstreamed in their schools. Fortunately, a specialized sensor was developed that could noninvasively, inexpensively, and within minutes detect the adequacy of the newborn’s hearing apparatus from the inner ear to the outside world. If a problem was detected, a referral was made to an audiologist.
After a several year campaign to convince relevant medical specialties that such a test would be cost effective, and more important, preventative of unnecessary human suffering, it is now a standard of newborn care in 36 states and several US territories.
More examples
Other such programs include the recognition of underdiagnosed coronary artery disease in women, guidelines for managing the serious side effects of cancer chemotherapy, the technological transformation of low-temperature sterilization, avoiding electrosurgical injury during laparoscopy, and the role of intraosseous venous access in emergency medicine.
Contact
For more information, you may contact us by emailing Susan Meister at susanmeist@gmail.com.
