MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — The Intermed Labs partnership with the Mon Health System to develop and market improvements and medical devices has been expanded to include the Vandalia Health System.

Intermed Labs started in 2020 as a startup for medical professionals who have concepts, ideas, or devices that improve the patient experience.

The president and CEO of the Mon Health System and executive vice president of the Vandalia Health System David Goldberg said they will now be part of a system that includes locations across West Virginia and in Maryland, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. It has 17 hospitals, more than 13,000 employees, and more than 2,000 doctors and advanced practice providers.

“Which means we have a lot of people who see opportunities across the healthcare continuum to improve patient outcome, fix a problem, and identify ways to make things better,” Goldberg said.

The partnership has already been recognized for the development of the Fingy3D. The Fingy3D improves access to prosthetics for people who have lost portions of fingers and has been nationally recognized as a way to regain function in a cost-effective manner. The development allows a patient to take a photo of their missing fingertip and receive a functional prosthetic in the mail in under a week. The Fingy can be 3D printed in several colors and materials, which the buyer can select after uploading their photo.

“It’s that type of easy technology that Intermed Labs has been able to master along with complex medical devices,” Goldberg said. “A device one of our urologists developed that has now received FDA clearance that’s going to be internationally available, and it started right herein Morgantown.”

Chief strategy officer for Intermed Labs, Ashok Aggarwal, said they employ engineers of all disciplines that design, develop prototypes, and produce.

“We overlay electrical engineering as well as technology enablement to make devices that are really connected into the cloud and leveraging artificial intelligence to make our devices much smarter,” Agarwal said.

Goldberg said the company is growing and developing new ideas all the time that have an important place in the medical industry, like the SNAPS eye shield. The SNAPS device is more comfortable, promotes better healing, and is more durable for the estimated six million eye surgeries that are needed each year.

“The ripple is starting to be seen in Morgantown. Inter Med is in the WVU Innovation Center taking space in that wonderful building,” Goldberg said. “Here we are, homegrown, in buildings, developing things, creating jobs, creating economic value, and improving patient outcomes.”

Argarwal said the operation in Morgantown is directly addressing the “brain drain.” The ideas that become opportunities from within the partnership are the motivation for doctors and engineers to stay in the state, take a job, and share their talents to forge advancements in medical care.

“We are able to attract and retain talent that would have been gone,” Agarwal said. “We had an engineer that had an offer from SpaceX, but we’re going to be able to keep him right here in Morgantown.”