The CEO of CareAline Products, a medical device company that produces sleeves and wraps to protect PICC lines and central venous catheters from being dislodged to prevent infections, said Children’s Hospital Colorado will roll out its sleeves and wraps hospital-wide later this month.
The deal is for CareAline Wraps for central venous catheters and CareAline PICC Sleeves.
Kezia Fitzgerald mentioned the news at MedCity News’ ENGAGE conference in Bethesda, Maryland this week. It’s exciting news for a startup that has worked for years to persuade hospitals to adopt its device.
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The move by Colorado Children’s comes after a year of working out how to deploy the sleeves and wraps, said Michael Fitzgerald, CareAline co-founder and Kezia’s husband. He said the idea is that every child with a PICC line would receive a sleeve.
CareAline makes a cloth sleeve and wrap consisting of cotton and spandex that keeps children from picking at and dislodging central lines that deliver medication for conditions such as cancer. The sleeve covers the entryway and some of the tubing of the line, hiding a location that would otherwise be the source of infections.
Fitzgerald got the idea for the sleeve soon after her daughter Saoirse was diagnosed with severe Stage 4 neuroblastoma, which gathers around the nerves in children 5 and younger. She was diagnosed in 2011 just months after Fitzgerald found out she had cancer. Fitzgerald developed the sleeve after her toddler contracted an infection from dislodging her PICC line.
The hospital had done a successful proof of concept study for the Class 1 exempt medical device. The study showed that the device could prevent accidental line removals.
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Fitzgerald won the pitching competition for health technology startups, Impact Pediatrics, held at the South by Southwest festival in March.
