Sheba Medical Center in Israel has implemented startup MedAware‘s medication safety platform.

The company’s key goal is to prevent prescription errors from happening. Its platform relies on data analytics and machine learning to accurately pinpoint potential dangerous medication outliers to the learned profiles of the patient, physician or organization. Additionally, MedAware’s solution strives to ensure low alert fatigue so clinicians don’t get desensitized to notifications.

In a phone interview, MedAware co-founder and CEO Dr. Gidi Stein explained that his company was in its early days when it first approached Sheba. The Israeli medical center launched a pilot of the startup’s technology.

“In the vast majority of cases, … the physicians were unaware a mistake had happened,” Stein said. “The numbers that we discovered were higher than anyone anticipated.”

In a statement, Sheba deputy director and CMO Dr. Eyal Zimlichman elaborated on the medical center’s relationship with MedAware.

“MedAware’s technology was tested within our internal medicine department with very successful results, including 80 percent accuracy of MedAware warnings — an impressive statistic,” he said. “As a result, Sheba has decided to roll out the MedAware program across the entire hospital, within the various medical divisions, including surgical, pediatrics and OB/GYN.”

On average, MedAware flags one warning per department per day at Sheba Medical Center, according to a news release. This adds up to about 50 interventions daily.

MedAware is based in Israel, but it also opened its U.S. headquarters in Stamford, Connecticut last year. In 2016, was part of startup accelerator Dreamit’s cohort of companies.

Stein, a practicing physician who specializes in internal medicine, co-founded MedAware back in 2012. The impetus for creating the organization came when a nine-year-old boy died after his doctor accidentally prescribed the incorrect medication.

“The physician clicked on the wrong button — like killing someone with a typo,” Stein said.

Anyone can make mistakes. “You can be the best doctor in the world and still have typos,” he added. MedAware’s solution can come in handy by catching those errors.

In early 2017, the company received clinical validation in a study to assess efficacy published in the Journal of the American Medical Informatics Association.

Going forward, MedAware plans on continuing to use its insights to bring value to the marketplace.

Photo: Martin Barraud, Getty Images