Ryan Seaberg’s dream was to play professional football, and although he was able to do that for about five years, he kept getting hurt, eventually suffering a career-ending injury in which he broke his elbow and tore his tricep.
Seaberg underwent surgeries and was getting prescribed OxyContin over and over and over, he said in a phone call. Around that same time, he lost one of his best friends to an opioid overdose.
“You can either do one of two things when bad things happen: You can either wallow in it, or you can use it as motivation to make a difference,” he said.
Seaberg sat down with his dad, a physician, to delve into the details about how prescribing worked, and they built their first product, an electronic prescribing system, in 2018 that they sold to a French company.
Chattanooga Technology Council honors local talent at annual awards
(READ MORE: This Chattanooga tech company is reinventing IT work)
They then put all the money from that sale into developing a new product called the eMAR — or electronic medication administration record. It aims to reduce errors, ensure patients receive the proper medicine at the correct time and save organizations time on administration and record keeping.
On Thursday evening, Seaberg’s company, EirSystems, was honored at the Chattanooga Technology Council’s sixth annual Technology Excellence Awards, an event that acts as a fundraiser for the nonprofit group while also shining a spotlight on often unseen technologists in the community. The company received the Tech Company of the Year Award, which was one of nine prizes handed out.
When a patient comes in to receive methadone, for example, EirSystems’ technology helps nurses keep track of dosages, including who gave the prescription and when. The company aims to keep patients safe and allow physicians to see more people by making the process faster, Seaberg said.
The name “EirSystems” is a nod to Seaberg’s grandfather, who he said was a consummate businessman and a first generation Swedish immigrant. Eir is a Norse goddess of healing.
“I’m just excited to keep growing the tech footprint in Chattanooga because there’s a lot of great companies here,” he said. “I’m hoping maybe we can inspire more people to continue to keep pushing.”
People tend to assume tech companies have to settle in places like Nashville, New York or Silicon Valley to be successful, Seaberg said.
“There’s a lot of really, really smart, intelligent, great companies in this city and really talented people,” he said. “I think it’s a cool way of just reminding people, ‘Hey, you don’t have to leave Chattanooga.’ You can get funding here. You can get the recognition. You can have people that can help you. And there’s a whole ecosystem willing to back you up.”
Karen Walker, the board chair of the Chattanooga Technology Council, said there’s plenty of venture capital in Chattanooga and many companies are drawn here because of EPB’s fast internet speed or the opportunities available through the utility’s quantum network.
“There is a lot of tech talent here in Chattanooga,” Walker said in a phone call before the event. “I just don’t feel that those companies are super connected to ChaTech or each other. That’s one of the things that ChaTech is trying to do is get all the tech talent connected to each other.”
The role of the Chattanooga Technology Council, a local nonprofit, has evolved over the years, Walker said, with its services ranging from coding camps to scholarship funds to championing women and girls in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. Each award at the event generally receives about 20 applicants, which judges then review in order to narrow the list down to three finalists, she said.
The group also revived its technology executive auction this year. During the auction, people bid on an exclusive two-hour meeting with some of the most influential C-level executives in the local tech community, according to the nonprofit.
A C-level executive is an employee at the top of an organization’s hierarchy who makes key strategic decisions that affect the entire business, according to indeed.com.
This year, the featured executives were Shelia Anderson, the chief information and digital officer at Unum; Rich Carpenter, vice president of communications and IT operations at EPB; and Jerele Neeld, chief information officer at the city of Chattanooga.
Another honoree Thursday, Vijayalakshmi Kumarasamy, is a doctoral candidate at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga and is working on a system that can detect the location of gunshots.
She’s also developing a separate piece of technology that would monitor the health of motorists and automatically take protective action if they suffer a medical emergency like a heart attack while driving. Both of those projects received recognition during the event.
“I’m so honored to receive the awards,” she said in an interview, “and I’m so thankful to the ChaTech community and for my professors and colleagues at UTC who always guided me and walked through with me.”
Contact business reporter David Floyd at dfloyd@timesfreepress.com or 423-757-6249.