Tech2Health: MedSnap wants to make medication errors a thing of the past
The idea: MedSnap ID is a mobile application that uses an iPhone’s camera to identify 4,700 types of pills to build a patient’s medication history and gauge the interactions of multiple pills taken by a patient.
Their pitch: “We have made it easy for clinicians to determine the exact medications that their patients take and, more importantly, what they possess. We have made it deployable for anyone interested in the safety and security of the supply chain to examine the actual product and authenticate the pill to make sure it is safe.”- CEO Patrick Hymel
Future plans: There are several large pharmaceutical companies in various stages of assessing MedSnap and how to deploy it, which could lead to potential partnerships.
Their story: When patients show up to a clinic with 15 or 20 different types of medication, it can cause headaches for their physicians. MedSnap looks to solve those problems by easily identifying pills down to their color, shape, imprint and size.
MedSnap ID helps doctors know exactly what kind of medications patients take and if any potential complications could arise from interactions between the pills.
“Issues of medication history are estimated to cost $100 billion a year just in admissions due to bad medication use,” Hymel said.
MedSnap also prevents the use of counterfeit pills.
In Asia and Africa, 30 percent of medication is fake, which accounts for 700,000 deaths annually just in Africa, Hymel said.
