Katie Adams
A Utah-based healthcare startup named Orion Innovations has released two studies this month demonstrating that its product helps nurses access medication lines faster and with less mental effort than standard labeling.
The product, called MedLite ID, is a device that quickly attaches to hospital IV lines. It uses light to assist nurses with the identification and tracing of medication infusion lines, with the aim of reducing the risk of errors.
MedLite ID addresses hospitals’ “infusion confusion” problem, said Orion CEO Rodney Schutt.
“The technology explosion over the last 30 years has not addressed [the problem],” he stated. “When you think about your average ICU patient, they have, on average, eight infusion lines going into them — many times it’s 10, 12, 14 or 16. Only one of those lines is considered the safe line, the carrier line, the keep-vein-open line. It is the only line that the nurse can come in and push another drug into without potentially causing, at a minimum, an adverse drug event, or at worst, a wrongful death.”
Today’s standard of care stipulates that nurses have to distinctively separate all these lines, Schutt noted. This results in nurses putting tape or other labels on each line that is significant to them, he said.
Having to do this labeling process for multiple patients adds to a nurse’s workload, Schutt pointed out.
“We simply go after identifying this critical line — the saline bag line — so that the clinician who comes in 17+ times a day to push another drug, besides all those drugs flowing through all those lines into your body, can see that this is the only line they can do that safely with,” he declared.
It typically takes nurses two or three minutes to find the correct bag, trace the line and match the correct port to administer a drug, Schutt noted. He said that this process takes just less than 10 seconds with MedLite ID.
Orion, which was founded in 2018, announced on Wednesday that it has published a study in partnership with Wake Forest University that proves the merit of MedLite ID. The study, published in the Journal of Infusion Nursing, highlighted the device’s potential to prevent infusion errors — especially in low-light ICU conditions, where MedLite ID had zero errors compared to standard methods. The study also found MedLite ID to be 24% faster in accessing the medication port and 40% less mentally demanding for nurses.
Earlier this month, Orion announced successful results from a different study, this one conducted in partnership with a Houston-based VA hospital. The research found that MedLite ID improved nurses’ medication access times by more 400% — taking just 1-7 seconds compared to 19-58 seconds with standard methods.
One of Orion’s main goals is to prevent situations like the RaDonda Vaught homicide case, Schutt pointed out.
In 2022, Vaught — who was a nurse at Vanderbilt University Medical Center — was convicted of criminally negligent homicide after she accidentally administered the wrong drug to a patient, leading to the patient’s death. She had used the hospital’s automated medication dispensing system and had mistakenly selected a paralyzing agent instead of a sedative.
Busy nurses can’t be expected to get it right every single time when they’re dealing with multiple patients who all have various infusion lines, which is why hospitals could benefit from products like MedLite ID, Schutt declared.
Photo: Orion Innovations