From left: MedCity News Editor in Chief Arundhati Parmar, CEO Vidur Bhatnagar, and MHIN President David Kereiakes
Keriton, a health IT startup that developed a Software as a Service to analyze how hospital Neonatal Intensive Care Units manage breast milk, won the health IT track for the MedCity INVEST Pitch Perfect competition earlier this month. The company provides much-needed insight to help NICUs troubleshoot and resolve breast milk delivery issues.
When Investment Rhymes with Canada
Canada has a proud history of achievement in the areas of science and technology, and the field of biomanufacturing and life sciences is no exception.
In a phone interview with founder and CEO Vidur Bhatnagar, he pointed out that the issue of breast milk management is more complex than many realize. The main services Keriton provides are ensuring that new mothers are producing enough breast milk for their infant and matching the right milk to the right baby, whether the milk is from the mother or a donor. Its service can also be used to chat with a mother at home if she’s not pumping enough milk. Keriton Kare Mom, the mom-specific app, creates a log for the mother to track how much milk she is pumping. Nurses are also able to send photos of a mother’s baby in the NICU, to reduce the stress of being separated from their child, which can undermine breast milk production.
What can make providing these services so complex, particularly for wider adoption, is that each institution has its own approach to breast milk management. Taking part in the Dreamit Health accelerator program helped the business make inroads with Penn Medicine for a pilot with the institution to validate the effectiveness of its technology, said Bhatnagar. But Keriton was going to have to persuade other hospitals and health systems to pilot its SaaS program. And therein lay the challenge for Keriton and other healthcare startups: How could they get hospitals to sufficiently assess their technology without disrupting the facility’s workflow? The answer: Conference room pilots, a practice Bhatnagar became familiar with when we worked for SAP.
In Keriton’s case, it arranges for institutions to reserve a conference room for up to six hours for the demo. Coordinating with the hospital in advance, the company can run the demo using NICU settings specific to that institution, (such as milk expiration times, fortifiers, and donor banks) to simulate realistic clinical scenarios. Activities are condensed to fit four days worth of tasks in four hours such as feeding a baby every three minutes instead of 3 hours. Nurses, lactation consultants, nurse managers, IT/IS members are invited to participate in the simulation. Here’s a description from Keriton’s blog post on the topic:
During the conference room pilot, Keriton trainers provide a hands-on overview of the system and respective workflows and the end-users fully test the system to evaluate its applicability for their NICU tasks. The clinicians get to use the system, and we get to showcase the capabilities of our comprehensive offering while collecting critical information for an actual go-live…
Four days after Bhatnagar published the blog post, he said the company got four requests from hospitals to do similar pilots.
What’s interesting about Keriton’s breast milk analysis tool is that it can shed light on trouble spots for hospital NICU workflows and help them better understand the reasons why errors or near misses are taking place. One challenge hospitals face is making sure breast milk is delivered within the expiration window, reducing the risk of hospital staff feeding babies milk past the expiration date. Bhatnagar said the company’s system has helped catch 120 near misses in 12 months. To aid in this task, Bhatnagar noted that Keriton uses visual and audio alarms that go off as soon as the milk is expired.
Like many healthcare startups, Keriton also had to work out a successful business model, ultimately deciding to charge hospitals.
This is a big commercialization year for Keriton and it’s raising a $2 million funding round in support of that effort. It has moved out of Dreamit’s offices into its own space in Philadelphia and is positioned to grow.
In contrast to other companies, Keriton’s service combines the functions that happen inside and outside the hospital. Peekaboo ICU, a North Carolina company, released its own app in October 2016 for parents with babies in a NICU. Peekaboo’s app also records a mother’s breast milk pumping sessions and milk production. On the enterprise side, Timeless Medical Systems, which has offices in Kentucky and Canada, creates a barcoding system for nurses to track and prepare breast milk for NICU babies.
Photo: Jack Soltysik
