Collaborative Bioscience: A Medical Sales Rep’s Worst Nightmare

Medical device salesman and University of Miami Florida entrepreneur Mark Slaughter had an idea. While selling medical devices to hospital groups around South Florida, he realized that many of these groups were spending their precious capital inefficiently by over-purchasing expensive equipment. “The typical health system for a city has five hospitals in it,” said Slaughter. “I realized that there was a business opportunity helping these hospital systems reduce their spending by optimizing purchases within the system.” From that premise, Collaborative Bioscience was born. Co-founded by CEO Mark Slaughter and fellow MBA classmates Mike Slocombe and Brett Reed, Collaborative Bioscience equips a city’s hospital systems with proprietary software and logistics platform. Collaborative Bioscience supplies member hospital groups with their cloud-based software which tracks more data than most hospital systems currently do and also allows each hospital in the group to track when and where their medical devices are being used. Hospitals are able to schedule when they need a device in their facility and Collaborative Bioscience handles transfer of the equipment between hospitals. By handling all device acquisition as a system, Collaborative Bioscience eliminates the need for individual hospitals within the group to over-spend on devices. Slaughter pitched his software to the DEF health system’s five departments heads of surgery.

“Several of them [Heads of Surgery in the hospital group] shook their heads in amazement,” said Slaughter, “when they realized they all used different data points and different software to analyze how they used medical equipment.”

The most telling moment was when one Surgical head noted he was about to unnecessarily purchase a $600,000 worth of equipment. “As soon as he said it, his counterpart chief from a hospital in the group two miles away said she already had that equipment in her department and they almost never used it,” said Slaughter. Recognizing they had an issue, all five signed on to become Collaborative Bioscience’s pilot customers. Collabortive Bioscience currently has $100K in seed funding from the University of Miami’s ‘The Launch Pad’ competition and commitments from other investors that will fully fund his Series A. Slaughter plans to raise another $100K in seed funding to bring the total to $200K and plans to launch with their pilot customer Jan 1 of 2012.