May 12, 2017
In a way, Todd Butka, the CEO of Murj, personifies the much ballyhooed crossover between Medtech and Tech.
Today, corporate giants such as Google, Apple, and Amazon look to bring their order to the pursued chaos of health care while Medtronic and other Medtech leaders begin to incorporate technology into their devices and systems.
Over a decade ago, Butka crossed over the same line leaving his product manager job at Apple to move into sales at Guidant and then Medtronic.
At Medtronic, he sold implantable cardiac devices such as pacemakers, loop recorders, and implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (ICDs) that continually generate important patient health and technical data.
Butka saw firsthand the challenges physicians and staff faced in collecting data from many wireless sources.
A chance encounter with a successful entrepreneur at a wedding reception led him to realize he had the insight and opportunity to ease their burden by starting Murj, creator of a software application that enables providers to efficiently manage data from implantable cardiac devices.
He founded Murj in 2014. The company secured a seed round in 2015 and recently announced more than $4.5 million in financing, led by True Ventures.
The software culls data from various manufacturers into one dashboard. Butka’s experience at Apple gave him a strong appreciation for simple and beautiful solutions, he explains. “Physicians want simplicity but it’s very complicated to find information quickly. I’ve seen providers struggle with the inefficiencies. Looking at the entire process, I thought there had to be a better way.”
Murj even improved upon the “three click” philosophy incorporated into iPhones by developing a system that meant data were never more than two-clicks away. Being cloud-based also allows Murj to be nimble with updates and fosters simplified implementation, integration, and access of information.
The company carries qualities from both sides of the Tech/Medtech chasm. But its origin story – the discovery of a desire to use technology to ease the burden of patients and practitioners – is something shared on both side of the technological border.
Todd Butka
Founder & CEO
MURJ
Todd Butka is the founder and CEO of Murj. Hailing originally from Florida, he first came to California to work for Apple (and surf). Todd learned exceptional design principles from the best of the best at Apple. So imagine his surprise to join the Cardiac Rhythm Management industry in 2005 and discover that healthcare was often a solid decade or more behind when it came to the latest in software design and engineering. Todd had an iPhone, Napster, and a Gmail account, meanwhile his customers were struggling with paper-based processes and decades-old CD-based software products. The contrast was jarring.
But Todd loved healthcare and working with the lifesaving cardiologists and electrophysiologists who used the advanced pacemakers and implantable defibrillators Todd helped implant. He spent 3 years at Guidant and later 6 years at Medtronic working closely with the device clinics. He got to know the doctors, the nurses and even the patients; with a soft spot for all of them, even the nice lady whose pacemaker he checked a dozen times before she backed straight into his car in a crowded hospital lot. He supported physicians who walked out of a long day in the EP lab to find mountains of clinic paperwork waiting for them. He worked alongside device nurses who spent more time futzing with programmers than fussing over their patients. And he worked through one particularly long summer of recall management, with pages and pages of device serial numbers and no easy way to track down the patients.
After all these years, Todd could not believe there wasn’t a better solution to manage all the devices and all that data spitting out of them. So he decided to do it himself. He brought together his product background from Apple, his deep knowledge of the CIED clinic, and some truly great partners in engineering, software design, security, business and sales— and Murj was born.
Todd has a family of his own now, and he still really loves to surf. It is personal when he says that his goal at Murj is “to get everyone out of the office with a clean slate and a clean mind, so we can get back to the heart of the matter.”
