Burlingame company debuts lifesaving solution
Mednition is a company based in Burlingame, CA that creates “machine learning-powered solutions for healthcare” . According to Business Wire press release, the company has raised $10 million in a Series A round of funding under the direction of the private equity firm Concord Health Partners.
Mednition was established in 2014 with the goal of helping “clinicians improve healthcare delivery and save lives.”
Mednition’s Care Solution
As this generous funding was announced, Mednition also introduced a machine learning solution for triage issues in providing emergency medical care. This software is dubbed KATE. Mednition plans its public debut at the upcoming Emergency Nursing 2019 conference in Austin, Texas.
The Mednition website describes KATE as its “flagship solution.” This software alerts triage nurses to irregularities in care that could merit a second look at some patients.
What is triage? The medical definition is the assignment of degrees of urgency regarding patient illnesses or wounds. The purpose is to make decisions for the order in which each patient will receive treatment when medical staff faces a large number of patients in need of care at once.
Mednition cited these examples of improved patient outcomes as a result of using KATE.
- More than 500 high-risk patients avoided the waiting room.
- The length of stay in the emergency room for sepsis patients requiring Intensive Care Unit treatment was reduced by 2.23 hours. This was the result of a nurse getting a message from KATE and “up-triaging” those patients.
The KATE software has already been in use at Adventist Health White Memorial (AHWM) in Los Angeles. This was the result of partnership between Mednition and AHWM that began in 2016. The goal was researching how machine learning could support clinical decision making. As a result of this research, AHWM deployed KATE in 2018. Study results demonstrated KATE’s potential to improve triage accuracy by 26.9% for every emergency room patient. The improvement in triage accuracy for high acuity patients was 93.2%.
Mara Bryant, Operations Executive at AHWM told Business Wire, “We have first-hand evidence that machine learning is improving healthcare delivery and saving lives.”
