Mark Eulie used to help entrepreneurs. Now, he is one.
Three years ago, Eulie hung up his small business banker pinstripes and began to sell a credit card-size device than can fit the electronic medical records for an entire family. Metro Medical’s 911 Medical ID is a slim, 2 gigabyte USB drive that can plug into any Windows computer, which means that whether you are in your doctor’s office in Verona or in the throes of an emergency across the country, your medical history can be close at hand. While major hospitals struggle to find an electronic medical records system that will put them in compliance with the federal government’s mandate, Eulie is finding a receptive audience among doctors and elder law attorneys.
“I wanted to make a career change,” says Eulie, who lives on the Laning side of town with his wife and twin sons. “Banking had changed dramatically. It had stopped being fun.”
Eulie is having fun now, but that is the product of a lot of hard work and more than a few moments of doubt. When he first saw Metro Medical’s prototype of the 911 card, he bought 50 and sent them out to family and friends and asked them what they thought. He took that feedback to the device’s original developer and asked for changes. He sought more feedback from retailers, doctors, nurses–anybody with a perspective on the vagaries of the U.S. medical system and the difficulties of remembering all our interactions with it.
“Our memory is not perfect,” says Eulie. “We can go to doctors and with 15 minutes to fill out a form, we can forget things.” Things that might be critical in an emergencies, like information on allergies and test results, or a medical directive.
That sold attorney Michael Rudolph on the device. Many of the clients in his estate planning practice are seniors and he had been spending $45 per client per year to have copies of their living wills and powers of attorney available electronically on demand. “When I learned about Mark’s card, I thought it was one of the best inventions I had ever heard of,” Rudolph says. Not to mention a cost savings, since the card retails for about $40. (Upgrades are free, and you can buy online storage of your records for $12 a year.) Rudolph purchased a supply, and gives one to each client loaded with their documents when he does their estate plan. The card has plenty of room left over for all their medical records, which they can easily input themselves or ask their doctors to upload. “And it’s the same size as their insurance card,” Rudolph adds. (There’s also a version that can hang from a lanyard.)
Rudolph, who has offices in Kinnelon and Oakland, also got some for his family. His parents are 94 and 95, and generally in good health, but Rudolph wanted to be sure that he and his sisters were all up to date on their medical information in case they had to go along on a doctor visit or take them to the emergency room. He bought one card for every member of the family and, in addition to the medical information, threw in a HIPAA release form to authorize disclosure of the information. “Now, if one of us has to go with them to the doctor or the emergency room,” he says, “we have all their information with us.”
Dr. Howard Holtz, who practices internal medicine in West Orange, likes the depth of information he can put on the cards for his patients. “In addition to medical histories and lab studies, we can scan in an EKG as well,” he says, referring to an electrocardiogram. “If the patient goes to the emergency room with an abnormality, the doctors there can see immediately whether it is an old or new abnormality.”
Feedback like this is giving Eulie the confidence to see a bigger future in his new career. By this time next year, Eulie predicts Metro Medical ID devices will be in four hospital systems in New Jersey and 200 retailers and professional offices. And if you’re in sales, Eulie has a message for you: “If you want to carry a second product, this is a great second line.”
