MedEye and SynMed sign partnership deal to bring MedEye’s breakthrough medication safety technology to the US market
Amsterdam, Netherlands - December 10th 2019 – MedEye, an innovative Dutch-Icelandic medtech company with an AI-powered medication verification system, and Canada-based Synergy Medical (SynMed) have announced a collaboration to introduce MedEye’s medication verification technology to the North American long-term care market.
MedEye ensures that a patient’s medication is correct at the bedside, just before it is administered, drastically reducing the chance of medication errors and saving nurses time. SynMed makes logistics processes for healthcare institutions faster and safer through the use of automated packaging systems. Combined, the two systems ensure that minimal effort is needed to accurately adjust medications for optimal patient treatment.
Gauti Reynisson (co-founder of MedEye) and Jean Jean Boutin, (President and Founder of Synergy Medical) shake hands on their new collaboration during ASHP Conference in Las Vegas.
50% reduction in medication errors saves resources for hospitals
The most common mistakes made in hospitals and long-term care facilities are medication errors. Almost every patient receives medication several times a day and management of this complex process constitutes a large proportion of the workload for nurses, doctors and pharmacists. Research has found medication error rates vary between 8 and 20 percent, including hundreds of avoidable fatal incidents and thousands of urgent hospital admissions. MedEye has shown that at least 50% of errors can be prevented using this technology, while reducing medication handling time for nurses by up to 40%. The collaboration with SynMed will further improve those results by focusing not only on stopping errors at the bedside but engineering the entire medication chain to be as error free and as cost-effective as possible.
Taking best practices even further
Gauti Reynisson, co-founder of MedEye: “MedEye has already been adopted across a number of facilities in Europe, resulting in an immediate positive impact on medication safety. We have found that hospitals already following best practices showed improvement under the MedEye system. MedEye started as an idea while we were doing our studies in Boston and while our first customers are in Europe we have always known that MedEye has a job to do in the USA, the world’s largest and most demanding market. Through this exciting collaboration with Synergy Medical, we can optimize the whole medication process with our combined product offering, improving safety from the pharmacy all the way to the bedside.”
Great leap forward
Jean Boutin, President and Founder of Synergy Medical: “We have always believed that good medication management needs to involve both logistics and support for nurses at the bedside. The combination of multi-dose blister packs filled by SynMed and MedEye at the bedside will allow our customers to be in full control of this key activity in patient care. We firmly believe that this represents the biggest improvement in medication safety at the bedside since the introduction of barcodes on medications 25 years ago.”
SynMed: Automated medication processes
Synergy Medical is based in Longueuil, Quebec, and from 2008 has been designing, manufacturing and installing automated systems which allow pharmacies to efficiently and accurately prepare compliance packs; specialized pill boxes that enable patients to adhere to their medication regimens. Synergy Medical has installed close to 500 SynMed® XF and SynMed® ULTRA systems throughout North America and in Europe, in independent pharmacies as well as in centralized production facilities for pharmacy chains. The client list of this leader in automated dispensing already includes the largest pharmacy chains in Canada: Shoppers Drug Mart, and the US: CVS/Omnicare.
MedEye: Assisting nurses in making sure medications are correct
MedEye is an AI powered optical verification system that accurately and efficiently identifies medications at the bedside, ensuring correct medication administration and registration. MedEye acts as a second nurse for faster and safer verification, while saving time and costs for hospitals and long-term care facilities.