Kevin and Patrick de la Roza are giving families real-time updates from the operating room. Though it was only a minor surgery, Dawn Lipthrott says there’s really no such thing when it’s being performed on a loved one, especially when the patient is over the age of 90. When her friend of 45 years and “second mother” Maria Boudet had a pacemaker replaced at Orlando Health hospital in May 2017, Lipthrott had the unenviable responsibility of spending the day in the waiting room. In the past, she would have waited several hours before a surgeon arrived with a brief update, which she’d then have to translate for the patient’s anxious but absent family members. Not anymore. Instead, she got messages from inside the operating room straight to her smartphone — and so did everyone else who wanted them, whether they were down the hall, at school or in another part of the world. “It was like night and day from what I had experienced before,” Lipthrott says. “I just loved it.” Now in 57 hospitals, the Electronic Access to Surgical Events (or EASE) technology is revolutionizing waiting rooms from coast to coast — as long as you can stomach a close-up view of Grandma’s gallstones. It’s the brainchild of Kevin and Patrick de la Roza, brothers who took vastly different paths in life only to end up in the same place. | 