The son of former Cabrillo Unified School District board President Ken Jones and wife Kim, Zach Jones, then 20, was used to being involved with public concerns. The former star of four Half Moon Bay High School musicals was set to make helping people a business, with a 2006 degree in biomedical engineering and management from Duke University.
What he found startled him.
 Zach Jones |
But with his training in medical issues and business skills, he turned his observations around.
“I thought this was a real marketing opportunity,” he said. “I can get them the physical tools they need.”
Two years later, Jones is the president of econoMEDics, a Palo Alto-based startup company. Small, with only six employees, its aim is to produce low-cost medical instrumentation designed for emerging markets in South America, India and Eastern Europe — all places Jones visited in laying the groundwork for his company.
He began by talking to South American doctors to assess their needs. He found plenty. “They had five (pieces of medical equipment,) they probably could use 50,” he said. “I ran into that everywhere.”
Obstacles to his vision included the fact that the focus in the medical equipment world was on the United States, Europe and Asia, which tended to build more costly equipment. Affordable devices built elsewhere did not tend to last long, he said.
“Building things that would survive in less stable environments was a beginning to driving down the cost,” Jones said.
There was also the discouraging issue of the distance from the United States to his target customers. But upon interviewing end users, he got the feeling that the need for high “value-per-dollar” medical devices that combined technology with affordability was real. So he proceeded with pragmatic optimism.
“People were afraid of the market because they thought it was faraway, hard to get to, so they’d give up,” Jones said. “They’d shy away from it. All these (issues) were there. But if it were easy, it wouldn’t be an opportunity.”
Aiming at the root of the matter, he focused on creating an infrastructure for building affordable equipment, or “leveraging commercially available low-cost computing platforms that drive the cost out of medical instrumentation.”
“You might as well build your own box,” he said.
And he did. “The platform became the vehicle for medical-device technology to gain access to price-sensitive emerging markets,” he said, explaining that the process was a matter of “using technology to repurpose low-cost computer platforms for medical-device purposes ... It was unique because no one else was focusing on this.”
The work was financed through bridge loans from a Peninsula private equity firm.
Rewards came with the first economoMEDics product, the “SpotOx” spot-check oximeter, which delivers oxygen saturation readings in children and adults — essential for treating acute respiratory infections, often killers for children.
This device, Jones said, solves a need for a link between diagnosis and treatment in places where pharmaceuticals are available but not cost-effective instrumentation that can detect and track symptoms.
“If you can build something that will last twice as long in an unstable clinical environment, it’s worth the additional cost,” he said.
He may have seized opportunity but, he said, it’s the human element that pulls him.
“I want to see doctors and physicians get the tools they need to do their job,” he said.
The next step is distribution. Toward that end he has met with representatives of the World Health Organization, the Harvard School of Public Health and MIT.
He credits all those Half Moon Bay high school musicals — plus a few forays into theater at Duke — with helping him get there.
“The ability to stand up in front of people and sing and dance was a benefit,” he said.
“This isn’t a fluff thing,” he pointed out. “At the end of the day, you can’t deny that the solutions you’re delivering are really important, and move the world in the right direction.”
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