NeoForce gives birth to baby table
Philadelphia Business Journal - by John George Staff Writer
IVYLAND — Among the features of the revamped $25 million neonatal intensive care-unit at Cleveland’s Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital is a specially designed operating room table developed by a Bucks County medical-device company.
The company, NeoForce Group Inc., specializes in hospital products for newborns.
About a year ago, members of NeoForce’s 11-person team were talking with officials from Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital about their multimillion-dollar NICU project. The hospital was looking to change the way care was delivered to premature infants and babies. One of their ideas was to do away with the old model of taking babies out of the NICU and to an operating room. Instead, they wanted to bring the operating room to the baby.
That’s how the idea of designing a surgical table for the specific needs of infant patients began.
“Some of the patients in a NICU are 500 grams, 1.1 pounds,” said Otho Boone, president and CEO of NeoForce. “You can have an infant the size of a Coke can and you have doctors operating on him on a huge adult table. It doesn’t make any sense.”
NeoForce spent nine months creating an infant surgical table — called the Rainbow Flex — that is more than simply a smaller version of an adult table.
Boone noted NICU patients are typically cared for on bed warmers or in enclosed incubators. The Rainbow Flex, he said, is a hybrid of a neonatal bed warmer and an adult surgical table.
One of the first changes was moving the arm that contains the control panels of a bed warmer from the center to a corner to give doctors and nurses better access to the infants.
The table itself pulls out so imaging equipment can be brought into the operating room and X-rays can be taken while a procedure is taking place, instead of afterwards.
In addition, the pitch and angle of the table can be altered — based on the requirements of the procedure — by remote control so the infant doesn’t need to be moved once he or she is placed on the table.
“That’s important because doctors are dealing with very fragile infants,” Boone said.
The Rainbow Flex table is also built on wheels to make it portable. “As simple as it all sounds, nobody has ever done this before,” Boone said.
Dr. Jonathan Fanaroff, associate medical director of the NICU at Rainbow Babies & Children’s Hospital, called the infant surgical table a “revolutionary” product.
“It enables pediatric surgeons and anesthesiologists to do their job better,” Fanaroff said.
Fanaroff said keeping babies in the NICU warm at all times is absolutely essential. “One of the problems we have is keeping them warm on a surgical table designed for adults,” he said. “This is one of the main problems [NeoForce] solved.”
The Rainbow Flex costs $70,000, as compared to $80,000 to $100,000 for an adult operating room table.
Boone said the company is in talks with other pediatric hospitals across the country about the infant surgical table.
NeoForce was founded in 2005, Boone said, as a result of consolidation in the neonatal product segment of the health-care industry.
Among the company’s products already in the market is a neonatal resuscitation device.
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