MIT alumni entrepreneurs Gauti Reynisson gauti@mintsolutions.eu and Ivar Helgason have implemented medication safety technology such as electronic prescription and pill barcoding systems at hospitals in their native Iceland and in other European countries. All that time spent in hospitals opened their eyes to the fact that surprisingly often, patients receive the wrong medications.
Seeking a solution, the duo from Iceland quit their careers and traveled to MIT where they teamed up with Maria Runarsdottir to devise MedEye, a bedside medication-scanning system using computer vision to identify pills and checks the pills against medication records to ensure that a patient gets the right drug and dosage.
Similar systems exist to catch medication errors. About 15 years ago, some hospitals began using barcode systems. These systems also require nurses to use a handheld scanner to scan a patient’s wristband and the imprinted barcodes on each pill container.
The problem is that companies sell medications with barcodes, while others sell software, or barcode scanners. Hospitals have to make all of these things work together and it is hard for small and medium hospitals to afford all of the technology needed. MedEye consists of an entire system that requires no change in a hospital’s workflow or logistics.
To use the MedEye, a nurse first scans a patient’s wristband which has a barcode that can access the patient’s electronic records. The nurse then pushes the assigned pills into the MedEye via a sliding tray. Inside the device, a small camera scans the pills, rapidly identifies them by size, shape, color, and markings. Algorithms distinguish the pills by matching them against a database of nearly all pills in circulation.
Commercialized through a startup called Mint Solutions http://mint.is, the team with Reynisson as CEO has raised $6 million in funding and is ramping up production to work with a Dutch healthcare insurance company and plans to bring MedEye to 15 hospitals across the country as well as Belgium, the United Kingdom, and Germany.
Today, Mint Solution has 40 MedEye systems ready to deploy across Europe in the coming months and the startup has its sights on developing additional medication-safety technologies. The company is open to meeting and learning from investors and potential business partners.