Health IT, Hospitals

Pinpoint Software’s technology aims to help hospitals with expiration date management

Madison, Wisconsin-based Pinpoint Software has released its Date Check Pro for Healthcare software, which seeks to help hospitals reduce medical supply waste by improving their expiration date management technique.

Surprise: Products expire. It’s far from new news, but it can be a problem when people forget or neglect this fact.

Madison, Wisconsin-based Pinpoint Software was founded in 2011 to confront the issue. The venture-backed company originally focused on the grocery and high-volume retail spaces. In these sectors, having an expired product on the shelf poses a danger.

“That really is a black mark against the organization,” Huey Zoroufy, Pinpoint’s market development director for healthcare, said in a phone interview.

When expired products are available, there are losses as far as quality and costs are concerned. In grocery stores, food safety issues arise.

To confront these problems, Pinpoint Software offers Date Check Pro, an expiration date management software. Its other solution, Taskle, is a task management and audit application.

Upon realizing the same expiration issues occur in various industries, the company decided to branch into healthcare. It has since released Date Check Pro for Healthcare, which is exactly what it sounds like — the Date Check Pro software, but catered to hospitals and healthcare organizations.

“The main thing we see ourselves in is we want to work in the existing processes to make things much easier,” Zoroufy said.

He went on to explain how Date Check Pro for Healthcare works.

Pinpoint provides a hospital with the DCP software and an iPad. The process then starts with a one-time setup, in which the hospital uploads all its inventory data into the DCP app.

When an employee goes to the supply room looks at the iPad, the app tells them which items will expire prior to the next check date. If that item is still on the shelf, the app prompts the employee to take action. That action may be one of a few things. The employee could put a “use first” sticker on the product or take it to a high-use area of the hospital. The hospital may have an agreement that allows it to trade or return high-value items to the vendor.

Finally, the employee plugs the next closest expiration date into the app, and the DCP software calculates when the next check date should be.

Zoroufy mentioned that HCA is currently evaluating the software. He declined to mention a broader list of hospitals using it.

The DCP app is subscription-based. Pinpoint is charging organizations that want to pilot it $225 per month, which is the cost of an entire facility, whether one department or a whole building. If an organization doesn’t want to go through the setup process itself, Pinpoint can do so at an extra cost.

Photo: PeopleImages, Getty Images

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