UNMC surgeon, Jason Johanning, MD, inventor and founder of Automated Assessments, presents his innovative approach for determining patient frailty before surgical prcedures.
OMAHA, Nebraska (May 7, 2025)—Local startup Automated Assessments recently landed FDA approval for its medical device and will be on the market and available for clinical use in the coming weeks, co-founder and inventor Jason Johanning, MD, announced last month.
Dr. Johanning, Professor of Vascular Surgery at UNMC and a nationally recognized expert on surgical quality, made the announcement as the featured speaker of the most recent Idea Pub: Morning Edition, held on April 24, 2025. Morning Edition is UNeMed’s entrepreneurial networking event.
“We’ve automated frailty assessment,” he told the gathering during his brief presentation in the new Catalyst building in the Edge District. Adding later: “We’re at the finish line.”
Automated Assessment’s frailty assessment tool, Vital-IT, is a handheld device that helps surgeons and healthcare workers determine the potential risk and recovery requirements for surgical patients. a patient’s ability to withstand and recover from surgery. The system, produced and manufactured in Nebraska, represents a significant improvement over previous methods for performing frailty assessment and automates the whole process.
Previous approaches to pre-surgical risk screening was a physician’s “eyeball” test. The field has moved to a more objective assessment by assessing frailty with a brief questionnaire.
While Chief of Surgery at the Omaha VA Medical Center, Dr. Johanning developed a more robust variation of the pre-operative assessment called the “Surgical Pause.” It established a new standard measure of patient frailty assessments, and was awarded the Eisenberg Patient Safety and Quality Innovation Award by the Joint Commission and National Quality Forum.
A critical element for the approaching product launch is that VITAL-IT can seamlessly connect with virtually all major healthcare platforms that track everything from patient charts to billing and reimbursement systems.
Automating the assessment was important for several reasons, including saving time and money for clinical staff and their institutions. But more importantly, Dr. Johanning said, many physicians and patients might not recognize their own frailty and are surprised when poor outcomes occur.
Patients might worry that “you’re going to identify me as frail and then use that to not take care of me,” he said. “That’s the absolute reverse of what we want to do. We want to identify frailty so we can wrap you with proper resources and care to optimize your outcome.”
Dillon De Rozairo (right), COO of Nebraska Innovation Labs, chats with an audience member shortly after his brief presentation during the April 24, 2025, Idea Pub: Morning Edition.
Dillon De Rozairo also delivered brief remarks, explaining the services Nebraska Innovation Labs provides. He is the Chief Operations Officer for the non-profit, which specializes in low-cost software and app development for area startups.
Morning Edition is UNeMed’s networking event for university innovators, entrepreneurs and startup community members. Catalyst, a co-sponsor of the event, also provided tours of the spacious facility, which is tentatively planning a grand opening event in late May.
Future Morning Editions will continue meeting in Catalyst’s Forge Event Hall, on the north end of the building. Guided tours will also continue as a feature of upcoming Morning Editions.
The next Morning Edition is planned for May 29, 2025, in the Catalyst Forge Event Hall at 9 a.m.-11 a.m. The featured speaker will be representatives of Grasshopper Health, which is developing a sophisticated wearable device for monitoring subtle changes and variations in a person’s gait. The device could lead to early diagnoses and determining disease progression for serious conditions such as Parkinson’s Disease, stroke, and peripheral artery disease.
