C-STATS CEO Derek Streat. Photo via C-STATS.

Johnson & Johnson today announced the acquisition of C-SATS, a Seattle startup that uses technology to facilitate performance reviews for surgeons.

Founded in 2014 and spun out of the University of Washington, C-SATS built a cloud-based performance management system that evaluates surgeons and helps improve their skills.

Johnson & Johnson will integrate C-SATS’ technology into its Johnson & Johnson Institute education and training platform. C-SATS employs more than 20 people; all plan to stay on post-acquisition.

“This scalable platform is powered by data capture, analytics and artificial intelligence, and will enable us to partner with healthcare systems in a differentiated way,” Sandra Humbles, vice president of global education solutions, Johnson & Johnson Medical Devices Companies, said in a statement. “It will fundamentally change how surgeons learn by giving them the opportunity to anonymously receive input on actual cases to improve their technical skills, which benefits patients, surgeons and health systems.”

C-SATS, which stands for Crowd-Sourced Assessment of Technical Skills, uses operating room cameras to record a surgeon’s performance. It then pays experts to analyze the video and provide feedback, like how well a surgeon used their hands to make an incision, for example. The technology is used by some of the nation’s largest health systems.

C-SATS CEO Derek Streat, a veteran of Classmates.com who previously founded AdReady and Medify, previously told GeekWire that the usual method of reviewing medical practitioners is an internal peer review, which can easily be biased because reviewers are often friends or colleagues. These peer reviews are often only conducted after an incident, he said.

C-SATS had raised nearly $6 million. The company was founded by Streat; Dr. Thomas Lendvay; Dr. Timothy Kowalewski; Dr. Lee White; and Bryan Comstock.

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