BioEnterprise, the Cleveland-based biomedical business formation initiative published their Midwest Health Care Venture Investment Report on Friday. The health care venture field is beginning to pick up. In terms of number of companies funded, Pittsburgh leads the pack with twenty-four totally almost $40 million in funding.
This high concentration stands out. In comparison the deals are smaller than the top city (in terms of amount funded) but the number of seed type funding provided is a good sign for Pittsburgh.
Comprising the report were mainly biopharmaceutical (48%) and medical device (38%). The larger Pittsburgh deals included Foundation Radiology Group, ALung Technologies, ClearCount and BodyMedia. The seed deals are hopefully companies to look for, including Almedtrac, Blacktown NC and Flexicath.
[via Pittsburgh Business Times]
The Marines have a famous motto that states “no man left behind.” ClearCount Medical Solutions, a five year old Pittsburgh startup that recently secured $3.4 million in funding, is trying to help hospitals adopt a similar mantra: no sponge left behind.
“Retained foreign objects” is the term for items such as surgical sponges and instruments accidentally left inside a patient following a surgical procedure. This is clearly a problem, as a study published in 2003 by The New England Journal of Medicine found that approximately 4,000 sponges are accidentally left inside patients every year. In the majority of cases, the cause is a counting error by medical staff.
To help make this problem go away, ClearCount has created the SmartSponge System, which uses a RFID (radio frequency identification) chip embedded in the sponges so that they can be tracked in two ways: counted before they are used and then accounted for at the surgery’s close. The company is garnering a lot of positive buzz, including an article in Time magazine in June.
At first glance, you would think hospitals would balk at the need to pay for such a system, figuring they could just try to implement a more failsafe manual counting system. But, there’s a lot at stake here. For starters, malpractice litigation never seems to do anything but increase, so implementing technology like this seems like a reliable way to reduce lawsuits related to sponges left behind. Then there’s the recent announcement by the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid that it will no longer cover the costs of 27 “Never events.” “Never events” are preventable injuries and infections that occur during hospital stays and, you guessed it, accidentally leaving a sponge behind after surgery is one of them. The average Medicare payment for admissions in which an object is left behind after surgery is over $63,000, so in addition to the obvious quality-of-care issue, it would seem financially prudent for hospitals to take a close look at ClearCount, one of only two companies currently providing RF-detectable surgical sponge technology.
With the recent funding and a solid product that appears to address a real market need, the future looks bright for ClearCount and, of course, for surgical patients.
