Between 10-20% of all hospital pharmacy kits contain expired or incorrect medications. This certainly poses problems for patient safety as hundreds or thousands of medications are transferred from hospital pharmacies every day. Kit Check, a startup based in Washington, D.C., is working to digitize the medication supply chain in hospitals by tagging items with RFID tags and using software to track these items. This subsequently reduces labor hours and presumably medical errors. According to their website,
“Kit Check inventories code trays, OR kits, emergency boxes and other kits in five seconds. It eliminates hand-written paperwork and automatically generates reports. Pharmacies can shift staff focus to clinical work and, in some cases, switch to a single checker reducing processing time by 90%.”
Kit Check, an alumnus of Rock Health‘s fourth accelerator program, has recently raised $10.4M in Series A funding. We had a chance to speak with Kevin MacDonald, CEO and Co-Founder of Kit Check, about the company and its goals.
Ravi Parikh, Medgadget: Could you give us a bit of your background? How did you get the idea for Kit Check?
Kevin MacDonald, Kit Check: Kit Check helps hospital pharmacies process kits that are used for surgeries and emergency situations automatically. We reduce the time to process a kit by 90% and remove the chance of errors.
Medgadget: Could you describe to us the problems with hospital pharmacy kit replenishment?
MacDonald: Typically when a kit is used in a clinical unit only a couple of drugs are removed from the kit. The kit is then sent down to the pharmacy, and more than 90% of the drugs remain. A technician must then manually check the expiration of every item and replenish any missing items. When the technician is finished, they had over the kit to a registered pharmacist who must re-do the technician’s work. The whole process take approximately 30 minutes for a medium size kit.
Medgadget: How does Kit Check address these problems?
MacDonald: Kit Check uses RFID and cloud based technology. When the kit comes back, it takes only 5 seconds to determine exactly what’s wrong with the kit and another 5 seconds to verify that the new kit contents are correct.
Medgadget: What have been the results of using Kit Check in terms of labor time saved? Are there any quality control issues?
MacDonald: Hospitals have been able to cut down their time to process a kit by more than 90% and they have been able to remove the need for a pharmacist check. The quality has drastically improved from one error in five to one in 4,000 (and the one in 4,000 was not Kit Check related). Overall this maps to about $3.35 in labor savings per item.
Medgadget: How have practicing pharmacists and other health professionals reacted?
MacDonald: The pharmacists love the product because it removes the pain of the worst job in the pharmacy. People also find the system very easy to use. Most folks are fully trained in under 10 minutes.
Medgadget: What is the status of development and hospital adoption?
MacDonald: We are constantly adding new reports and functionality, but the hospitals love the current feature set. We have 12 customers that represent 20 hospitals.
Medgadget: We read about your recent successful Series A Funding Round. Could you tell us a little about how you plan to use the funds? What is the future of Kit Check?
MacDonald: We’ve seen an increase in demand for the product, and we are using the Series A round to meet that demand by building out our sales and delivery teams.
Link: Kit Check…
Press release: Kit Check Raises $10.4 Million To Automate Hospital Pharmacy Process…
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