Sweetening the Pill: Israel’s MedAware works to end prescription error

Israeli entrepreneurs have become well known for their seemingly innate ability to think outside the box.  In 1959, Simcha Blass sought to make the desert bloom by creating the world’s first drip irrigation system. More recently, Amit Goffer, a quadriplegic and CEO and founder of Argo Medical Technologies created a robotic exoskeleton that provides the disabled with the ability to walk again.

The challenge (or thrill in a lot of cases) of solving a problem excites and propels Israeli inventors to come up with innovative solutions to solve these problems. Gidi Stein, founder and CEO of Israeli startup Medaware is no exception to this phenomenon.

Solving prescription errors with big data solutions

An estimated 1.5 million people are affected each year by prescription errors in the US alone, resulting in thousands of preventable fatalities. In addition, drug prescription errors are unfortunately a common occurrence that currently costs the average hospital around $5.6 million annually. Gidi Stein, who also serves as the deputy head of Internal Medicine at Rabin Medical Center, designed Medaware in an attempt to avert these drug prescription mistakes.

The company was founded by Stein after a colleague of his mistakenly clicked the wrong drug in an adjacent box in a pull-down menu. This simple mistake cost the life of a nine year old a week later, and Stein vowed to build software – today called Medaware – that would prevent such tragedies in the future.

“Our mission is to eliminate harmful medication errors. To this aim, MedAware uses big-data analytics of large-scale electronic medical records data assessing, statistically, which drugs are right and which drugs are wrong for each individual patient, in real time,” Stein remarked.

New drugs, new potential for errors

New drugs hit the market all the time, a challenge to doctors who struggle to keep up with the pace of new drug launches. This also can lead to prescription errors. Medaware approaches this problem by leveraging advanced machine learning, so that its software can continuously update its database with the newest medications being prescribed to the public.

Medaware is currently raising a round of investment on OurCrowd, my firm and a leader in equity crowdfunding. OurCrowd’s platform provides curated investment opportunities in top Israeli and global startups to accredited investors worldwide. Learn more about Medaware and other exciting investment opportunities by clicking here and signing up on OurCrowd.

Source: This blog post is a translation of the original article which was featured in SiliconWadi, a French magazine dedicated entirely to Israeli technology and innovation.

MedAware annonce la fin des prescriptions médicales erronées (siliconwadi.fr — French)

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