The People and Passion Behind MindRhythm

By: John Keane, CEO and co-founder, MindRhythm

When I first learned what MindRhythm sought to achieve, it was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up. I typically gravitate toward new medical technologies that solve known problems, and enjoy taking companies that haven’t yet experienced commercial success, and successfully bringing them to market.

The majority of my career has been spent identifying companies that have emerging technologies with significant potential but have not found commercial success despite that potential. My role within each of those organizations was comprised of redefining the commercial strategy by way of clear understanding of not only their unique clinical scenarios, but market landscape and then redefining the responsibilities of the commercial, development and clinical teams to support these strategies. As a result, companies such as Integra, ClearPoint Neuro, Masimo and Zoll found significant market success and financial growth as a result of this work. However, one theme that was evident through all of the product launches and turnaround scenarios I have been asked to lead is that there was infrastructure in place, and quite often it was the infrastructure rather than the product that was interfering with success. MindRhythm presented the opportunity to build an organization from the ground up, correctly, with a novel platform addressing a serious problem in medicine that touches countless lives. .

MindRhythm’s revolutionary device, Harmony, is life-altering. The device rapidly identifies a patient experiencing a large vessel occlusion (LVO) stroke, which helps prevent disability or death. Most new medical products meet resistance, but the EMS community has responded very favorably to Harmony, which was developed specifically for use in an EMS environment. By solving the triage problem in strokes, I am proud to be a part of the solution to a widely-known issue in medicine.

I have always believed that if you solve an important problem first – and think of patients first – a company will be successful, and I can’t wait to see what the future holds for MindRhythm. We have already shown, through two published trials, that Harmony works. We are now enrolling in our prehospital tria to demonstrate to the world that our device will their triage decisions in the clinical setting in which it will be used.

Here at MindRhythm, we hope to ultimately see adoption of proper stroke triage – first in the United States, and eventually, globally – which would have a profound impact on saving lives and improving quality of life for stroke victims. There aren’t many areas of medicine where you can have this significant an impact on longevity and quality of life.