Klein Medical has concluded its first successful bench top blind trials using its latest proof of concept drug verification prototype. The company is developing a solution to verify intravenous drugs at point of administration to prevent injury from medication errors. Its solution is an optical analyser combined with a proprietary drug sample container.

The tests were conducted at Industrial Research Limited, New Zealand’s largest government owned industry research organisation.

At the end of 2011 Klein Medical completed the construction of a new prototype with the objective of being able to verify in blind tests a set of commonly used intravenous drugs. Having commissioned the hardware at the beginning of the year tests were conducted in March 2012. For the majority of drugs and solutions there were no errors. None of the drugs had false alarms when the drug that was presented was correctly the one intended.

The company believes with additional work the error rate can be significantly reduced. The next steps include further testing and data analysis, followed by production of a fully fledged beta prototype capable of planned trials at Auckland Hospital.

Davina McAlister (Research Nurse, Auckland Hospital)
Greg Shanahan (Klein Medical Limited)
Dr Ray Simpkin (Scientist, Industrial Research Ltd)
Dr Tim Short (Anaesthetist, Director of Research Dept of Anaesthesia, Auckland Hospital)