Edison Nation Medical, a medical device incubator and healthcare innovation portal, is launching a global search to uncover innovative ideas for improving the design, packaging and administration of medications as a way to address the issue of accidental poisonings. This search coincides with National Poison Prevention Week, which takes place March 16 – 22.
Every 15 seconds, a Poison Control Center somewhere in the United States receives a call. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), there are approximately 2 million poison exposures in the United States every year—57 percent among children under the age of six.
In 2007, Dr. Daniel Budnitz, a scientist with the CDC’s Medication and Safety Program, started tracking children who were treated in emergency rooms after potentially toxic accidental pharmaceutical poisonings. At the conclusion of his tracking period in 2011, federal estimates put the number at around 74,000, which surpassed the number of children younger than six who needed emergency room treatment as a result of car crashes.
Poisoning from medication also affects the elderly; these poisonings are more likely to require hospitalization and to be fatal compared with younger individuals. Analgesics, cardiovascular medications, COPD and asthma preparations, antidepressants and other psychotropic medications are most commonly implicated in drug poisoning fatalities in elderly Americans. The primary reasons for unintentional drug poisonings in older patients include taking more than the prescribed dose, taking someone else’s medication, administering medication incorrectly and storing medication improperly.
According to the CDC, more than 41,000 people died as a result of poisoning in 2008 and more than 76 percent of those poisoning deaths were unintentional.
Bobby Grajewski is president of Edison Nation Medical, a healthcare product and medical device incubator and online community for people that are passionate about healthcare innovation. Prior to joining Edison Nation Medical, Grajewski, a serial entrepreneur, co-founded two online companies (Heritage Handcrafted and eCollector) and spent five years in venture capital and private equity both in the middle market (J.H. Whitney Capital Partners & Kamylon Capital) and at larger LBO firms (Permira Advisers) investing in companies across numerous industries.
Grajewski holds a MBA from The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, a MPA from Harvard Kennedy School, and a BA from Harvard University.
Here he discusses Edison Nation Medical, its importance, who it serves and how it came to be.
What is ENM? How did it begin and who are your partners? Please provide a little about the history, present and future goals.
Edison Nation Medical is a medical device incubator and online community for people passionate about making a difference in healthcare. We provide a clear pathway for anyone—physicians, nurses, technicians, entrepreneurs, university tech transfer officers, small companies, and even patients and caregivers—to submit their medical product innovations for in-depth review and potential commercialization. Our business model is based on trust—trust between a person with a great healthcare invention and a company that gives a thorough and expert read to determine the value of the innovation. If an innovation has value, we find it, unlock it and get it to market in order to improve care, lower cost and increase access for the patient.
Edison Nation Medical was founded in 2012 as part of a collaboration between the prolific consumer product developer Edison Nation, and Carolinas HealthCare System, one of the nation’s leading public healthcare systems. Both valued innovation in healthcare, and desired to create a model whereby open innovation in healthcare could exist, outside the traditional pathways, that would foster new ideas to improve care and increase efficiencies in the healthcare ecosystem.
