Better sepsis diagnostic tests fail to save lives in community hospitals not because the science is bad, but because understaffed emergency rooms don't suspect sepsis quickly enough to act on the test results in time.

15:32this really interesting thing that in academic medical centers when you try out these new sepsis tests, they work great and you see much better outcomes and you see, you know, people live longer and it's saving lives. And then you try to replicate that in bigger studies and they fail. And when you dig in and look why, it's when you expand that aperture of who's in the trial out

15:52of the academic medical center and into community hospitals. What's happening in a community hospital is they're so understaffed, they're so overwhelmed with the volume, particularly in the emergency room, they don't suspect sepsis fast enough and as I said earlier, it's every hour is 12% increase in mortality. And the intervention that they have to do is actually pretty severe. They basically put a big IV line usually in your femoral artery. They're

16:17pumping you full of fluids. They're pumping you full of nasty antibiotics that have bad side effects. So, it's a pretty aggressive treatment. But if they don't suspect sepsis early enough and jump to that treatment, by the time they get there, it's already too late. And so if you're in a community hospital and it's 2 a.m. on a Saturday, is there someone on staff that actually suspects sepsis early enough or does it wait

16:37until Monday morning? And so it doesn't matter if you have a better test if no one ever runs it. And so the original pitch behind curative is let's take the learnings from an academic medical center and go out to community hospitals and basically build mini hospital in a hospital uh that just manages their sepsis patients. So whenever they get somebody you know we will diagnose them as having sepsis out

17:02of the emergency room. We will then take on that patient. They would pay as a fixed fee. So no matter what happens we're on the hook. If we can drive a better outcome by applying mostly just getting doctors to follow the instructions but at scale then you could drive better outcomes um by getting those academic medical center type um like clinical results but helping a community hospital actually do that.

17:24>> So what happens then we we start that business >> start that business we raised uh a million dollars of seed money. Uh Justin was the first investor you mentioned at the beginning Justin Matine. Uh he came in uh right as I was shutting down Shield. He was an investor in Shield. Um and he wanted to put more money into Shield. And I said, "No, I I don't think

17:44you should do that. I think that company is is, you know, is not going to make it unfortunately, but I'm thinking of starting this new thing." And he was like, "Yes, I'm in." And he didn't even know what it was. >> How much did he put in? He >> put in, I think, $125,000 uh at a $3 million valuation. Wow. >> So, he was the first >> Okay.