Tech Company Grows In Verona

Verona has a valley that runs through it. But even if you put the words “Verona” and “Valley” together, they probably won’t evoke cutting edge technology in the way that the words “Silicon Valley” do. And yet, at the north end of Grove Avenue, in the valley cut by the Peckman, is a company that is causing folks in tech hot spots to take notice. It’s called LiveProcess and yes, it got its start in a garage.

That was in 2004 in Chatham, N.J. Since then, the company relocated to Verona and the Web-based emergency response system it developed has been implemented by some 500 hospital companies across the country. LiveProcess has grown from two employees to 30–computer engineers, marketing pros and sales reps–20 of whom are based in Verona. (The rest are scattered across the U.S.) And if you grew up in Verona, you probably spent time rooting against John Lubarsky, now the company’s senior VP for sales, because he once was a quarterback for Cedar Grove.

Disasters, not touchdowns are Lubarsky’s focus now because what LiveProcess does is to help hospitals respond to emergencies. In the event of a health crisis, a LiveProcess client can quickly alert everyone whose help is needed and assign them where they need to be. It does so through one system, rather than the fragmented and fractional set-ups most hospitals now use. And it gives them all one central place for managing patients and paperwork.

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“We can help hospitals communicate using technology,” says Paul Ruderman, the company’s vice president of operations. “In Katrina,” he adds, referring to the 2005 hurricane that devastated New Orleans, “nobody communicated, particularly the hospitals.”

Hospitals are required by law to run regular emergency drills. Before LiveProcess came along, that was a tedious manual process that involved staging a mock disaster, assigning participants their roles as victims and responders, and compiling reports on how well all performed. Using LiveProcess, a hospital can quickly simulate any kind of emergency, print cards for victims that describe injuries likely to be suffered in that emergency and track how well medical personnel do in handling them.

To Ruderman, the company is on track for much bigger growth down the road. The 500 hospitals that it now counts as clients are just 6% to 10% of all the hospitals in the U.S. “We are looking to add several hundred hospitals over the next few years,” he says. And the growth likely won’t stop there. LiveProcess believes its approach to managing medical data could also be used by other care providers, from nursing homes to outpatient clinics. Next month, it will roll out a system at Saint Barnabus Medical Center designed specifically to help burn centers coordinate their available patient beds.

That kind of growth bodes well for Verona. LiveProcess’ lease (in an old mill building that was home to a cutting edge bronze powder manufacturer a century ago) runs through 2014. The company expects to add to both its sales and engineering staffs this year, and it sources most of the latter locally. “NJIT”, says Ruderman, “is a great source of engineering talent”.