STAMFORD, Conn. – Gartner Group’s list of Cool Vendors in Healthcare for 2016 includes Toronto-based ThoughtWire, the developer of an intelligent “Internet of Things” platform that integrates and orchestrates workflows for medical devices, alerts and notifications, building systems, and other electronic assets. It is the only Canadian company in Gartner’s group of five Cool Vendors.

ThoughtWire’s marquee client site is the Humber River Hospital in Toronto, which is making use of the Ambient platform to coordinate all of the functions of its highly computerized, “Hospital of the Future.” ThoughtWire also provides its platform to the Innovation Unit at Mackenzie Health; the hospital in Richmond Hill, Ont., has adapted an actual patient-care floor to develop and test new technologies as a way of improving the delivery of healthcare.

According to Gartner, “ThoughtWire’s Ambiant intelligent hospital platform creates an environment smart enough to anticipate what the patient needs and, in some cases, automatically takes action to simplify and streamline the patient experience and expedite clinical or administrative workflow requirements.”

“It’s such an honour for us to be named, but truth be told, the real accolades should go to our customers – they are the people doing really cool things,” said Mike Monteith (pictured), CEO and co-founder of ThoughtWire. “I think an even bigger story is how Canadian hospitals are leading the way globally in intelligent hospital design. From what I can see from our vantage point, we are way ahead in Canada.”

Gartner reported that, “A healthcare provider armed with the Ambiant platform would possess a high degree of situational awareness and operational intelligence and the means to use this information to improve operations, care delivery and the patient experience.”

It adds, “The Real-Time Healthcare System (RTHS) intersects with other care delivery technologies and systems to capture, aggregate and correlate data in real time for decision support.”

In addition to ThoughtWire (www.thoughtwire.com), the four other companies highlighted by Gartner are:

• Aegis.net of Merrifield, Virginia (www.aegis.net). The company produces technology that ensures interfaces are properly designed, tested, versioned, deployed and supported.
• Apervita, of Chicago, Illinois (http://apervita.com). Apervita produces a secure, self-service platform for health professionals and enterprises to author, publish and subscribe to a market of evidence-based algorithms, quality and safety measures, pathways, and protocols. It is opening up new channels to disseminate those[solutions] that have been developed by leading healthcare organizations.
• Bright.md of Portland, Oregon (http://bright.md). Bright.md provides its SmartExam as a software as a service (SaaS) solution, designed to deliver evidence-based care, enhance communication between primary care physicians and patients, and enable faster diagnosis and treatment. Currently, there are 11 modules for patients to choose from. Using a computer or mobile device, patients respond to a dynamic sequence of evidence-based clinical questions until the system reaches one of about 70 diagnoses.
• Genospace of Cambridge, Massachusetts (www.genospace.com). The exploding availability of clinical data from EHR systems is being combined with genomics research to create a new wave of companies tackling the challenges of translating the rapidly expanding body of genomics knowledge into practice. Genospace is cool because it has developed a cloud-scale data analytics and collaboration infrastructure to drive a revolution in medical diagnosis and treatment. Genospace prioritizes solutions not just for providers and clinical researchers, but also to give individual patients a gateway for direct engagement and collaboration with the research community and personally relevant insights.