Harvard Research Shows New Technology Can Save Thousands of Lives a Year by Reducing Prescription Errors

RAANANA, Israel, January 19, 2017 /PRNewswire/ --

• A recent Harvard clinical research of almost 800,000 lives demonstrated that MedAware's new data-driven technology establishes a ground breaking path to eliminating prescription errors and potentially saving millions of patients affected by it, annually.  
• The study reveals that MedAware's data-driven approach identified prescription errors, which were missed by existing clinical decision support (CDS) systems, while demonstrating a high degree of accuracy.  
• In fact, three-quarters of alerts generated by MedAware's system were directly relevant to identifying potentially life threatening prescription errors.

Raanana, Israel - (Jan. 16, 2017) - MedAware, an algorithm-rich software startup dedicated to eradicating prescription errors, is pleased to report today the findings of a landmark study carried out by Harvard Medical School.

The study analysed records from almost 800,000 patients in order to assess the efficacy of MedAware's innovative and unique solution, and the results have provided a comprehensive validation of MedAware's disruptive solution.

Dr. David Bates, a leading national Patient Safety expert and opinion leader, Professor of Medicine at Harvard Medical School, and a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the Harvard School of Public Health said:

"It has been hard to find medication errors which come completely out of the blue - likely a medication used only in pregnant women which is ordered for an elderly male - but this approach detects orders which appear to be anomalous in some way, and it represents a very exciting new way to pick these errors up before they get to the patient."

Dr. Gidi Stein, MD, PhD, MedAware's Co-Founder and CEO stated that:

"Minimizing these errors is clearly of the utmost importance, as at the end of the day, it's our patients and loved ones who are at risk, and we must do everything in our power to reduce that risk. We need to find innovative ways to identify and eliminate errors, while reducing alert fatigue - hence our solution."

The findings, published on 19 January 2019, in the Journal of American Medical Informatics Association (JAMIA) revealed that MedAware's technology establishes a new standard for prescription alerts and patient safety vis-à-vis traditional rule-based systems. These out-dated solutions, can only detect a fraction of the actual errors, only those that they were pre-set to identify, and these solutions are not built to identify random or complex errors.  Moreover, since current CDS systems are not patient-specific and not self-adaptive, they suffer from high false alarm rates, directly contributing to a phenomenon known as "alert fatigue", where physicians simply learn to disregard alerts.