Fort Worth Startup Working On Seamless Surgery Scheduling

SurgeryLink offers a solution for the communication and coordination challenges that can often hold up medical surgeries.

Complex surgeries can be stressful enough for patients, but when they get canceled at the last minute because someone wasn’t notified, it can be even worse.

The anesthesiologist, the medical implant provider, the insurance company, surgeons, and nurses all have to be on the same page.

That’s the problem that Jason Barber aims to solve with SurgeryLink, a Fort Worth startup that has a seamless solution to notify everyone involved in the surgery.

He knows firsthand the pain points that hospitals experience, especially for complex surgeries, from his time in the medical device industry.

“In one place you can communicate with all your vendors. You can notify them of the implants and the equipment you’ll need.”

Jason Barber

“We fit in to solve the communication and coordination challenges,” Barber said. “In one place you can communicate with all your vendors. You can notify them of the implants and the equipment you’ll need.”

SurgeryLink is being beta tested at three facilities and it hopes to get into more hospitals soon.

They are at two Massachusetts facilities, New England Baptist Hospital and North Shore Pain Management as well as the Children’s National Health System in Washington, D.C.

SurgeryLink founder Jason Barber

By 2018, SurgeryLink hopes to have an official launch.

Hospitals aren’t that quick to pivot to new cloud-based technology when they are so used to using traditional faxing methods, especially when they have to comply with federal health-care privacy laws.

“The user adoption is challenging,” he said. “We’re just so used to doing the same things the same way. You have to go above and beyond that you’re serious about doing everything you can to protect this information.”

The data is encrypted in transit and at rest. The fact that a startup can access the same encryption technology used by the government is democratizing the IT industry, he said.

“You have to go above and beyond that you’re serious about doing everything you can to protect this information.” 

Jason Barber

“Patients benefit from companies like ours coming into the marketplace, offering a solution that’s more affordable and outside the good ol’ boy system of the large health IT companies.” Barber said.

The network isn’t always perfect so there have been growing pains along the way, but Barber said he stays on the forefront to solve those problems as quickly as possible.


Delivering what’s new and next in Dallas-Fort Worth innovation, every day. Get the Dallas Innovates e-newsletter.

R E A D   N E X T