Retired Doctor Invents Automated Exam Table for Patients

After retirement as a dermatologist, Dr. Willis Martin decided to launch a new career helping older patients as well as those in wheelchairs be able to get up on the exam table.  Throughout his many years of service, he had helped many, but now he hopes to help even more people who require a doctor’s care. He set about building a better table – an automated lift table that couples with a special wheelchair called the Chair-A-Table.

The Chair-A-Table starts as a wheelchair.  The arms and wheels can be pulled away while the back and legs fold out to resemble an examination table.  The table then can be raised to a comfortable height and handles more than 1,000 pounds.  All the while, the patient never has to leave the chair.  The Chair-A-Table can able be used without the wheelchair as a traditional examination table for doctor offices.

“I’ve always been a tinkerer,” Martin said, recalling with fondness his boyhood ingenuity in building a motorized chicken feeder using a washing machine engine and a well pulley. The exam table, while more sophisticated than a gizmo that feeds chickens, achieves the same results: It makes his work easier while improving the care of those he’s entrusted to help.

Despite being turned away by manufacturers of doctor examination tables, Martin is producing and selling the Chair-A-Table from his own company’s headquarters in Wendell, NC. Martin said he has made sales to the Veterans Administration, plus doctors’ offices in North Carolina and beyond – including the United Kingdom, Australia and Kuwait. “Every doctor who goes to medical school says they want to help people, not make a lot of money,” Martin said. “I said that, but I meant it. I mean it now. That’s why I’m working so feverishly on doing this.”

Larry Coats, a patent lawyer at Coats and Bennett in Raleigh and a former fraternity brother of Martin’s at NCSU, said Martin contacted him seven years ago and told him he had this idea for this examination table, and Coats knew to take it seriously. “He’s a very persistent man,” Coats said. “He calls me down to his office and says he sees patient after patient come in in wheelchairs and they have problems getting on the examination table. He says he started thinking about it and he didn’t have any particular drawing, but he had all this in his mind.” Coats said he was immediately captivated by the idea – $7.4 billion in expenses occurs every year from lifting patients that causes some health care workers’ back injuries.

“My experience is that the great majority of private inventors at the end of the day are not successful,” Coats said. “And this is one of the first things I talked with Dr. Martin about. I said, ‘You are a doctor, you don’t have any experience in designing medical equipment, and this is a long, hard, expensive road.’”

Coats hired a patent draftsman to put the vision on paper while a prototype was assembled at a farm equipment manufacturer in Virginia. They filed and were awarded several U.S. and international patents on the  design. He also got the U.S. Food and Drug Administration certification that is needed for medical equipment.

Dr. Tom Andrus, a Raleigh dermatologist, has had a table in his office for about four years, buying one of the very first available.

“My patients have aged as I have aged,” he said, noting that ordinary examination tables are too high for many older patients to access. “It was well thought-out,” Andrus said.

Initially, Martin tried to sell the idea to the big examination table manufacturers, but they showed little or no interest. With the help of friends and colleagues, he lined up $2 million in startup funds to launch his own business, Martin Manufacturing.  “I had a decision to make – did I let this idea go, or did I take it to the next step on my own,” he said. “I took a walk in the woods behind my house … and did a lot of deep thinking. I realized if I continued to practice medicine until I was on my last breath, the last patient I saw would be the last person I ever helped.  “But if I were able to bring this idea to reality, then I would be able to help people not just in Nash and surrounding counties in Eastern North Carolina, but all over North Carolina and all over world, and this device would aid those people to get a better exam, and aid nurses from hurting their backs lifting patients, and aid doctors to do better diagnoses and treatment.”

Martin Manufacturing now operates from its production site in Wendell. Although he’s not building thousands of the tables yet, business is growing.