About WiscMed
From The CEO
Medicine was a second career for me. I was originally trained as an engineer. I worked at IBM for a time before starting my own technology company, Berbee Information Networks Corporation. After selling Berbee to CDW in 2006, I went to medical school and then completed a residency in emergency medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
There were many challenges for me in medicine. Besides starting medical school at the advanced age of 42, one of the most frustrating was the pediatric ear exam. I could never see what I was supposed to see in a wiggling, crying 6 month-old. Multiple times, it was impossible to be certain if the child had an ear infection, and my attending agreed that it was appropriate to start antibiotics. Most clinical environments use ear exam technology that was developed hundreds of years ago. Recent attempts by others to improve on classic otoscopy missed the required clinical features;
1. Must be small enough to enter pediatric ears and get by the ear wax that is inevitably present.
2. Must produce an image good enough for diagnosis.
3. Must easily integrate into the existing clinical environment.
4. Must be clean between patients.
5. Must tolerate being dropped and generally abused.
6. Must be able to share images with parents, learners and colleagues.
There had to be a better way than traditional analog otoscopy. I assumed a few months of work and we would have a solution. It took 5 years to develop the Wispr® Digital Otoscope by WiscMed®.
The WiscMed team is comprised of clinicians, engineers, regulatory specialists and business executives that care about one thing – supplying you with a device that you can reliably count on to give the best possible view of the eardrum. We hope when you use the Wispr Digital Otoscope you smile at how straight-forward an ear exam can be.
A bit about our company name. WiscMed is shorthand for Wisconsin Medicine. I was born and raised in Madison, Wisconsin and benefited from the public education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Portions of our technology are licensed from Wisconsin Alumni Research Association (WARF). You may be familiar with the medication Warfarin, also brought to you by WARF. A portion of the proceeds from every device and speculum support research at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
We are committed to providing a device for your clinical practice that is useful, robust and well supported.
James G. Berbee, MS, MBA, MD
jim.berbee@wiscmed.com
