Montréal start-up takes the guess work out of pediatric care

The Challenge

In emergency rooms across North America, one third of children needing medication will receive an incorrect dose due to the high margin of error of doing these calculations manually. This results in medication waste, increased hospital stays, and a significant financial strain on the healthcare system.

The Solution

Introducing the IV Assistant™, the innovative smart bracelet developed by NURA Medical that takes the guesswork out of pediatric medication dosing, avoiding potentially life-threatening and costly mistakes.

The Outcome

By automatically assessing a child’s weight and performing accurate dosage calculations, the IV Assistant™ will be able to reduce errors by 50% and save hospitals up to $1.3 million per year.

NURA Medical’s IV Assistant™ facilitates medication preparation and ensures that children get the right dose every time

Sofia Addab, Jean-Gabriel Lacombe, and Georgia Powell are master’s students in the Department of Experimental Surgery at McGill University in Montréal. During a shared internship shadowing medical staff in the emergency room at the Montreal Children’s Hospital, the trio quickly identified that the time-consuming practice of calculating correct doses of IV medication by hand was leading to potential mistakes and disrupting workflow at critical points during the intake of trauma cases in the hospital’s emergency room, posing serious safety risks to children.

“We knew that we wanted to do something about it, and that we could do something about it,” says NURA Medical Chief Clinical Officer and Co-Founder, Sofia Addab.

Supported by $45,000 in research funding through the Mitacs Accelerate Entrepreneur Program, Addab, Lacombe, and Powell joined forces to come up with a solution. Thus, NURA Medical, a med-tech start-up with a mission to improve pediatric patient care and clinical efficiency in emergency situations, was launched in 2020.

The IV Assistant™

Working with pediatric emergency physician Dr. Ilana Bank, the NURA Medical team have developed a smart arm bracelet they’ve named the IV Assistant™. This breakthrough technology accurately predicts a child’s weight and subsequently performs the often-complex calculations typically done by hand to determine the correct dose of medication needed for a particular child.

While adult medication comes in standard doses, pediatric medication is prescribed according to the weight of the patient.

“Different child, different weight, difference dosage,” explains Addab. “The problem in busy medical environments,” she says, “is that physicians don’t have enough time to use a scale and, therefore, often guess a child’s weight based on age or height, or a combination of the two, putting a tremendous cognitive load on medical staff at such a critical point in care.”

The team went to work on creating a first-of-its-kind weight-predicting algorithm using American Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) weight and arm measurement data.

“Through our research, we found that arm size is a better predictor for overall weight than current practices, so we leveraged it and digitized it,” says Jean-Gabriel Lacombe, Chief Executive Officer and Co-Founder.

By measuring the circumference of a child’s arm using the built-in retractable tape measure, the IV Assistant™ detects the pediatric patient’s weight and communicates this data to a companion web app that automatically determines the correct dose of medication required for that child while also providing support and directives to hospital staff in administering the medication.

“What our device does is automate the whole process to reduce the cognitive load on nurses,” explains Addab. “Not only are we removing the opportunity for human error, but we’re able to get that medication to that child as quickly as possible.”

An immeasurable impact

Early testing of NURA Medical’s IV Assistant™ at the Montreal Children’s Hospital is already showing a 50% reduction in medication errors and a decrease in the time it takes to prepare a dose of pediatric IV medication. With less medication getting wasted, the IV Assistant™ also has a savings potential of approximately $1.3 million annually for any Level 1 trauma centre regularly using the device.

As the NURA Medical team continues to work on testing and refining their technology, the young entrepreneurs credit Mitacs with providing the guidance and support they needed at a critical juncture of development.

“Mitacs really helped us to rapidly prototype our device in a medical setting by giving us access to a huge network of hospital professionals in the field who are the ones experiencing the challenges our company aims to solve,” says Georgia Powell, NURA Medical Chief Operating Officer and Co-Founder.

With the support of Mitacs and its network of research experts, the team was able to develop a thorough research protocol that contributed to minimizing biases in their algorithmic weight predictions.

“Mitacs wasn’t just about funding. Mitacs gave us a leg up when it came to establishing our research protocol and provided the expertise to address algorithmic biases in what we were doing,” adds Lacombe.

On partnering with NURA Medical, Jesse Vincent-Herscovici, Vice-President of Business Development at Mitacs, is confident that the start-up will have a meaningful impact on Canada’s already growing medical device industry.

“NURA is a really nice example of connecting dots between multiple different realities,” he says. “You have this blending of clinical reality and the business aspect. And then you have the technical aspect, which is the actual device, which was a really nice mix of relatively simple mechanics but also very high-tech AI in order to turn those measurements into personalized medicine.”

But the potential impact of the IV Assistant™ goes beyond new algorithms and dollars saved.

“I think the impact is not really measurable. You’re saving children’s lives. These are people’s babies,” says Addab. “And I like that we’re providing healthcare professionals with tools to help them be better physicians.”

NURA Medical expects to have an IV Assistant™ prototype ready for regulatory approval as a class II medical device by the year 2023.

Mitacs’s programs receive funding from valued partners across Canada. We thank the Government of Canada, the Government of Alberta, the Government of British Columbia, Research Manitoba, the Government of New Brunswick, the Government of Newfoundland and Labrador, the Government of Nova Scotia, the Government of Ontario, Innovation PEI, the Government of Quebec, the Government of Saskatchewan, and the Government of Yukon for supporting us to foster innovation and economic growth throughout the country. 

Do you have a business challenge that could benefit from a research solution? If so, contact Mitacs today to discuss partnership opportunities: BD@mitacs.ca.

Mitacs Team

Mitacs’s website content is created by people throughout our organization, united in their passion for innovation and eager to share their perspectives with others in the innovation ecosystem. 

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