MedAware – The Startup That Can Stop Your Doctor From Accidentally Killing You
Josh Fischlin and Ruth Schuster | August 14, 2016
MedAware software alerts participating doctors to illogic in prescriptions, spotting error in drugs (or patient mix-up) before it’s too late.
A few years ago, a nine-year-old Israeli boy dropped dead from his bike. Why? Because of preventable medical error.
The boy was killed by a brain hemorrhage after a doctor accidentally prescribed an anticoagulant instead of an asthma drug. “It’s like killing someone with a typo,” says MedAware CEO Gidi Stein.
Enter MedAware, a safety net with learning capacity, to catch errors. Its software can identify potential prescription mistakes and alert the doctor when the prescription is issued, rather than when the patient flops over.
Available alternative systems are rule-based, which, says Stein, is like looking under the lamp-post: you only find what you are specifically looking for, if it’s there. Also, “they have so many false alarms that doctors get alert fatigue and start ignoring the warnings,” he explains.
In short, they don’t work well, and the problem is big. A Congress-commissioned report by the Institute of Medicine found that medication errors hurt or kill at least 1.5 million Americans each year.
