Doctors getting paged or phoned might not know it, but many of the emergency notification systems linking hospitals, patients and physicians came from a company founded by longtime Edina resident John (Jack) Collins.
Collins, who founded Amcom Software in 1984, died Nov. 28. He was 70.
His daughter, Kathy Veldboom of Chanhassen, said that her father was selfless, and treated employees and customers with the same respect that he offered his own family.
She heard recently from a former employee who said that 10 years ago, Collins found out that the worker's niece was sick. "Jack gave him a plane ticket and said, 'You'd better get going,'" Veldboom said. "I never heard that story until a week ago but it was typical of him," she said.
Collins was born in south Chicago, joined the Marines and attended Regis University in Denver. He moved to Minneapolis and met Bonnie, his wife of 45 years, on a blind date at the Minnesota State Fair.
Sean Collins helped his father sell Amcom Software three years ago and said that Jack wrote into the contract that the new owners must keep all 50 employees on the payroll for at least 12 months. The firm, which began in Edina and moved to Eden Prairie, now has 230 employees and $50 million in annual revenue.
It provides software that Veldboom calls the "backbone of internal communications" for hospitals. It is used at Stanford University Medical Center, Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, Duke University, Yale University and many other leading care centers.
The firm has also developed secure communications gear for use within the White House. And the U.S. Army uses its speech recognition software so that soldiers can call home from remote military outposts in Afghanistan, Iraq and elsewhere.
