Profile of an Agile CTO: Mike Pritts, CTO of PeriGen

“The product must work 24/7 and must be clinically correct all the time. It is a life-and-death environment that we participate in. How we deliver that solution ultimately is my responsibility.”

Mike Pritts

CTO, PeriGen, Inc.

Mike Pritts says the buck stops with him.

Pritts is the CTO for Princeton, N.J.-based PeriGen, Inc., which delivers advanced obstetrics clinical decision support and documentation systems, as well as fetal-monitoring systems into hospital labor and delivery (L&D) departments.  He is responsible for ensuring that the company's software, used by more than 15,500 medical professionals, incorporates OB protocols and best practices used during the L&D process. The obstetrics department typically accounts for 40 percent of a hospital’s medical malpractice cases. The goal of PeriGen’s offering is to reduce risk and improve clinical outcomes.

Like many agile CTOs , his role is to align technical product development with business goals. He’s producing a product used in life-and-death situations.

The Buck Stops Here

PeriGen expects it will support approximately 244,994 births this year  -- a birth every two minutes.  That makes the CTO’s role critical.

"The technology is the heart of what we do," notes Pritts, who has been at PeriGen for approximately one year.  “The product must work 24/7 and must be clinically correct all the time. It is a life-and-death environment that we participate in. How we deliver that solution ultimately is my responsibility."

By comparing the care ordered against published standards of care, its PeriBirth system can recommend alternative care plans that incorporate best-practice protocols for each patient, based on that patient's specific clinical condition as it changes over time.

PeriBirth has prevented a clinically significant error in more than 10 percent of deliveries, according to the company.

Pritts explains how PeriBirth works: "When mom and baby -- or babies -- are admitted to the L&D floor, our system captures all of the clinical encounter documentation and creates the electronic file.  It's streamed into the clinical-decision support system and the input from care providers and from devices is captured and documented."

The innovation, Pritts explains, is that the information is both entered by clinicians and automatically pulled from other sources such as the fetal-monitoring strip and lab reports to present a total picture of mother and baby. This information, which includes patient vital signs, type and stage of delivery, details on any pre-existing conditions and other data critical to patient safety at L&D, is constantly evaluated against built-in protocols in the software.

Pritts notes, " [The system] provides the tap on the shoulder at 3 a.m., say, to the caregiver -- when the nurses are short on staff or busy, and many moms are in the L&D process."

Digesting Information

Among Pritts' staff of 65 are some 20 medical clinicians who constantly review content and incorporate the most current protocols into PeriBirth.

The company's medical director manages and leads the clinical organization of nurses, midwives, OB physicians and others experienced in labor and delivery. Pritts notes, "They apply practical experience to research. My office then takes that research and internalizes it, intellectualizes it and 'operationalizes' it. [We] build a construct that forms to how our system digests that information."

"Digesting" information into the software is a key part of the CTO's function. The CTO's office oversees an important final step for that information, using proprietary tools and processes to enter the clinical content into the PeriBirth system, which has a rules engine that is constantly being updated. "The system has over 6,500 rules and protocols that are always working in real time," notes Pritts.

Innovation to Keep Agile

Developing fetal-monitoring software for use in L&D means that some of PeriGen’s solutions fall under FDA oversight. For some companies and some executives, this could change the company's core.  "It's a tough challenge to keep an innovative DNA in a company," says Pritts.

Pritts works to keep creativity and change moving ahead at PeriGen. "You must ensure that [your company] has the experienced people who have the brand in their peer circles - the researchers, scientists who are tested, tried and true.  And that they have ability to think innovatively and critically and can apply that to their theories and ideas and be able to hand that to an organization that can deliver."

Pritts also says it is equally important to have a fresh perspective from the younger generation which can learn and be mentored by the more experienced innovators and researchers in the company.

The process and vision also must be supported by the company's leadership, says Pritts.

"You have to provide visibility to creation and innovation.  If you just turn that into something practical for the business, that's not enough. You must provide the capability and the organization infrastructure to support getting the word out and assisting them in getting published and getting the patents through the process."

"It may take a while to get the right mix of people, but it is worth it,” says Pritts. “It is my job to leverage. I had to balance and provide freedom for these ideas to generate."