One thing I’ve learned as I’ve traveled the world is that many of the challenges we face in healthcare are the same around the world. Certainly, there are different ways that healthcare is paid for which provides unique challenges, but so many of the problems we face in the US are things that healthcare everywhere faces.
A great example of this is medication reconciliation and pharmacovigilance. Adverse events due to medication issues happen everywhere. According to stats from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention Lown Institute, 1 in 250 Americans go to a hospital emergency room each year due to an adverse drug event. That’s millions of people going to the hospital due to adverse drug events. What a big problem.
This is the problem that Synapse Medicine is trying to solve. You may not be familiar with the company because they got their start in France and they now provide medication reconciliation and pharmacovigilance for many of the top hospitals in France. They just raised $28 million in funding to scale their platform and bring many of these solutions to the US. Plus, they’ll be exhibiting for the first time at the HIMSS Annual conference in Booth #8172 if you want to stop by and learn more or you can schedule a meeting.
What Synapse Medicine found was that medication reconciliation was really challenging and the interfaces to do this important job weren’t up to the task. The correct solution needed to be intuitive for the doctor and pharmacist so that they could save time while doing it more effectively. They also looked at how they could automate the process as much as possible and how important it was to have effective information exchange.
The reality is that many patients in the hospital are receiving medications from multiple doctors that don’t always share what they’re doing. Not because they don’t want to share, but because they’re busy and we haven’t made it easy to share and reconcile those medications. This can often lead to adverse drug reactions (ADRs).
Along with providing a tool for medication reconciliation, Synapse Medicine also offers a pharmacovigilance solution called the Medication Shield. This AI powered solution helps to facilitate the real time management of adverse event reports. This real time detection of pharmacovigilance signals unifies all the information in one place to facilitate decision making by pharmacovigilants which improves patient safety.
Medication Shield also uses NLP algorithms to extract the terms used when reporting an adverse reaction so it can be matched to the MedDRA classification. Then, it’s analyzed to see whether this adverse reaction is expected, its level of severity, and frequency. It is currently being used for the COVID-19 vaccination campaign in France by the French National Agency for Medicines and Health Products Safety (ANSM) and the Regional Pharmacovigilance Centers (CRPVs) to automate pharmacovigilance and acts as a protective barrier.
At the end of the day, the key here is trying to reduce adverse health events. According to AHRQ, it costs healthcare $27 billion to pay for hospital readmissions related to preventable adverse health events such as medication non-adherence. We need every tool in the toolbox to help us solve this problem. Why not learn from a company who’s doing it successfully in France?
You can learn more about Synapse Medicine on their website. Also, if you’ll be at the HIMSS 2022 conference in Orlando, you can see their products first hand at HIMSS Booth #8172. Stop by their booth for a demo or to learn more about their experience in France. You can also check out their HIMSS Innovation session on “Enabling Access to the Best Medicine” happening Wednesday March 16th at 2:45 PM ET at the Innovation Live Theater.
