Hospitals, Startups

Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia spinout developed medication error assessment tool

Bainbridge Health has raised about $3.5 million in seed funding to date, including $1.6 million from BioAdvance, Chestnut Street Ventures and, Children's Hospital of Philadelphia.

Bainbridge Health screen shots

Medication errors are one of the leading health hazards in the U.S. But as a recent report from the ECRI Institute makes clear, what makes this issue so complex for hospitals to manage are the multiple causes behind it. Patient identification errors, alert fatigue, data integrity with electronic health records, improper dosage based on the patient’s weight are just some of the most common factors.

Joe Kaupp, Bainbridge Health CEO, a former entrepreneur-in-residence with Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP) with a background in oncology software management and services, co-founded the business with the former medication safety officer with CHOP — Sean O’Neill, Bainbridge Health Chief Clinical Officer — to confront some of these issues head-on with a software as a service tool they developed. The company refers to it as medication safety as a service. The clinical intelligence and analytics product is designed to make medication data easier to manage and use by making medication data easier to aggregate, analyze and address and by de-siloing data across healthcare facilities so that clinical decisions are more informed.

Opioids and oncology agents are of particular interest because they are so potent and oncology treatments need to be administered in a narrow therapeutic window.

In a phone interview, Kaupp highlighted some of the reasons why he believes Bainbridge Health could help other hospitals improve their medication error rates.

Kaupp said that most hospitals do not have the skillset or the resources to extract insights from the technologies they use such as automated dispensing cabinets and smart infusion pumps, Kaupp said. He also paraphrased his co-founder O’Neill: “Hospitals are data rich and information poor.” Although there is lots of data on safety concerns, it remains in a raw state and underutilized.

In one example of how Bainbridge is working with hospitals, Kaupp zeroes in on the issue of alert fatigue. An infusion pump, for example, may generate repeated false positives to the point where medical professionals ignore it. That increases the risk of a legitimate alert being ignored. When the company goes live with a hospital one of the first assessments it does is to determine how rapidly a medication alert or alarm is overridden. The business also identifies all of the clinically relevant alerts over time with the goal of providing better alert parameters for each institution.

Although Kaupp acknowledged that he doesn’t foresee the company achieving 100 percent standardization across healthcare institutions it works with, he sees a way to reduce the scale of medication errors. 

Bainbridge Health has “a couple dozen hospital sites”, a combination of inpatient and outpatient facilities, that are currently live on its platform and pay a  subscription fee. 

The medication safety startup is the latest in a succession of CHOP spinoffs such as Spark Therapeutics, which was the first company to receive FDA approval for a gene therapy, and Haystack Informatics, which developed a health IT performance and security assessment tool.

The company has raised about $3.5 million in seed funding to date,including $1.6 million from BioAdvance, Chestnut Street Ventures and CHOP. The new funding will be used to add software engineers and data scientists — four to six hires overall — and product development. 

 

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