Murj didn’t just appear one day out of thin air – we are a small but mighty group that has been working together for three years to develop this platform. Since we hope to meet you in person some day, we thought we’d start by introducing ourselves.
Let’s start with the guy who started it all: Todd Butka is the founder and CEO of Murj. Hailing originally from Florida, he first came to California to work for Apple (and surf). Lucky guy, Todd learned exceptional design principles from the best of the best at Apple. So imagine his surprise to join the Cardiac Rhythm Management industry in 2005 and discover that healthcare was often a solid decade or more behind when it came to the latest in software design and engineering. Todd had an iPhone, Napster, and a Gmail account, meanwhile his customers were struggling with paper-based processes and decades-old CD-based software products. The contrast was jarring.
But Todd loved healthcare and working with the lifesaving cardiologists and electrophysiologists who used the advanced pacemakers and implantable defibrillators Todd helped implant. He spent 3 years at Guidant and later 6 years at Medtronic working closely with the device clinics.
Todd got to know the doctors, the nurses and even the patients; with a soft spot for all of them. Even the nice lady whose pacemaker he checked a dozen times before she backed straight into his car in a crowded hospital lot. He supported physicians who walked out of a long day in the EP lab to find mountains of clinic paperwork waiting for them. He worked alongside device nurses who spent more time futzing with programmers than fussing over their patients. And he worked through one particularly long summer of recall management, with pages and pages of device serial numbers and no easy way to track down the patients.
After all these years, Todd could not believe there wasn’t a better solution to manage all the devices and all that data spitting out of them. So he decided to do it himself. He brought together his product background from Apple, his deep knowledge of the CIED clinic, and some truly great partners in engineering, software design, security, business and sales— and Murj was born.
Todd has a family of his own now, and he still really loves to surf. It’s personal when he says that his goal at Murj is “to get everyone out of the office with a clean slate and a clean mind, so we can get back to the heart of the matter”.
