North Shore firm’s software tracks illness outbreaks

Friday, June 04, 2010
By Erich Schwartzel, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette

Some poor soul in Wyoming checks into an emergency room with a stomachache, and a 12-person team on Pittsburgh’s North Shore can tell if he’s alone in his misery.

Health Monitoring Systems is a young software company hoping to track enough poor souls nationwide to create an AccuWeather-type radar map that follows illness patterns and can alert officials of an outbreak.

The company’s headquarters has all the trappings of a cool startup: A pool table dominates the main hallway; next to it sits a foosball table and below a kayak hangs from the wall. Some employees walk around in flip-flops.

But Kevin Hutchison, CEO and a veteran of the dot-com era, said his company had “one foot in the cool startup world and one in the practical mom-and-pop world.”

Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/10155/1062976-28.stm#ixzz0w7FSamEF