WA company aims to bridge healthcare gap in rural areas

LEAVENWORTH – Dopl Technologies is on a mission to improve healthcare access in rural underserved areas of Washington state and beyond. 

The Bothell-based software company provides diagnostic imaging through collaborations with Cascade Medical in Leavenworth and other rural medical centers in the state. 

The company was founded in 2022 by computer scientist Ryan James and physicians Stephen Seslar and Wayne Monsky.

"Dopl's mission is equal access to healthcare," Dopl CEO James said. We believe that no matter what you look like, where you live, or what you believe in, you should have the same level of access to healthcare as everyone else." 

"The problem that we're solving is, the further you get from the big city, the less access you have to specialists who can perform certain types of procedures," James said. "So whether it's an ultrasound, or whether it's a minimally invasive procedure when you live in a rural area, your local hospital likely won't have a specialist who can perform these procedures on you, and so you are more at risk of not getting diagnosed. You're more at risk of not receiving treatment, and as a result, rural areas tend to have higher mortality rates than urban areas."

Dopl is a platform for telerobotic procedures that enables specialists to perform robotic procedures over the Internet. 

A telerobotic ultrasound is when a remote sonographer controls a robotic arm that's holding an ultrasound probe to scan a patient who is in a different location. This enables them to diagnose a whole host of diseases so that patients in rural areas have better access to diagnostic care, James said. 

The company is starting with telerobotic ultrasound and will expand to other types of procedures in the future.

Currently, Dopl provides a sonographer who travels to Leavenworth one day a week. Once the company gets FDA approval, it will take the next step and provide telerobotic ultrasound diagnostic imaging. 

Cascade Medical COO Pat Songer said Dopl's ultrasound services help make diagnostic imaging more accessible and convenient for their patients. 

Songer said that the Leavenworth facility does not have the patient volume to sustain a Monday through Friday sonographer.

Previously, patients had to travel to Wenatchee for imaging. Traveling from Leavenworth to Wenatchee may not seem too bad, but patients coming from further areas of the district, like Plain, would have a longer drive. He said there is often a delay in scheduling as well because of the volume of patients needing ultrasounds in Wenatchee.

Songer said Dopl helps Cascade Medical to provide the level of care that patients deserve. 

"So we'd like to provide services in rural America or especially to rural Washingtonians the same way you would receive services in a large city, and this is, you know, through innovative ways of doing that, this is a great opportunity for us to be able to take some of those steps forward in doing that," he said.

"It's just a great service for us to offer in rural America to reduce barriers to care," Songer said.

How it works

In the future, if a patient in a rural community needs an ultrasound, they would come to their local hospital. A medical assistant would then position the patient on the bed and guide the robotic ultrasound into position. 

The patient would be able to view and communicate via real-time video with the sonographer, who would be located a few hundred miles away. The sonographer would then guide the robotic ultrasound just as they would if they were there in the room. The sonogram images would then be sent to the corresponding specialist, who would communicate the results to the patient's primary care doctor.

How it began

Dopl CEO James said all three founders have their own stories about what inspired their passion for providing care to the underserved.

James grew up in Kalamazoo, Michigan. At that time, it had one of the highest black infant mortality rates in the nation. His father moved the family there specifically to address that issue. 

"He did it by leading these community-wide efforts that brought care into black communities," James said. "And that resulted in Kalamazoo going from one of the highest black infant mortality rates in the nation to one of the lowest." 

"And that has always shaped my perspective and inspired and motivated me because it so clearly demonstrated that health outcomes aren't about what you look like," James said. "They're not about where you live. They're not about anything other than the systems around you that do or do not support you. And we have this opportunity to restructure our current healthcare system to support everybody. And that's what drives me every day."

Seslar is a pediatric cardiologist who performs a procedure that involves putting a catheter inside the heart to help cure heart rhythm disturbances. 

Seslar's inspiration began around 2015 when his parents retired and moved to rural Vermont. They started getting older and having health issues. As the family's only physician, they reached out to him to sort through the challenges of getting care in rural communities, he said.

"And that was my first personal experience, sort of dealing with how hard it is to get all sorts of different care out in rural areas," Seslar said. "And so my initial motivation was thinking about procedures and you know, how can we do some of this specialty care that we provide through procedures out in rural areas?" 

This made Seslar think about how his patients often travel long distances to see him from Montana or Alaska or areas in Eastern Washington because they do not have access to specialists in their communities. 

"So one of the things that has become more and more exciting to me as we went down the ultrasound route is how ultrasound has become, to some extent, the dominant first-line imaging for just about everything," Seslar said. 

Ultrasound can diagnose a whole host of issues, from abdominal conditions such as a problem with the gallbladder, appendix, or colon to heart problems, thyroid issues, and even problems with muscles and joints. It is also used for obstetrics and gynecology. Seslar said ultrasound is an incredibly versatile diagnostic tool. 

"And so by setting up sort of this capability, and then being able to connect the robot, to any one of a number of different types of trained sonographers, whether they're heart sonographers, or abdominal sonographers, or OB sonographers, we can now unleash a whole range of different things that they now can access in a rural hospital that would have been challenging before," Seslar said.

Quinn Propst: 509-731-3590 or quinn@ward.media.