For the last several decades, the challenge of healthcare-associated infections (HAI) has been growing. The risk of catching an infection while receiving healthcare treatments is immense and can increase during outbreaks, affecting hundreds of millions of people worldwide.
With a mission to develop, manufacture, and commercialize novel solutions to address HAI challenges, an innovative medical device company named AseptiScope Inc. was formed. AseptiScope Inc. is driven to bring innovative and validated solutions to market that lower the risk of contamination and infection in healthcare systems.
We, at Insights Success, caught up with Scott Mader, the CEO and Co-founder, Kelly Powers, the COO and Cofounder, and Steve Daly, the Chief Commercial Officer. They shed light on how AseptiScope aims to deliver infection prevention for clinicians & patients through its novel solutions.
The Conception Notion
AseptiScope Inc. was founded in 2016 as a private entity by experienced business professionals and clinical experts. Most of the founding team members had worked together previously in various successful healthcare ventures; thus, it was a natural development for them to take an entrepreneurial step.
Together, the team identified a significant need in the marketplace and set on a journey to establish a company dedicated to delivering essential, novel infection control solutions for patients and clinicians. The team built out the organization with key hires in the ensuing years, moved from product prototyping to commercialization, completed its Series A funding, and is now kicking off its Series B raise.
AseptiScope is also now scaling up manufacturing in support of a full-scale hospital-focused launch of its first product in the USA and is putting plans into place for expansion into other channels, as well as OUS markets.
An Innovative Flagship Product
AseptiScope recently launched its flagship infection control product, The DiskCover™ System. The system is carefully designed to deliver on specific performance, functional, and design attributes identified by both clinical experts and direct market evidence. Years of methodical work by the AseptiScope team to identify these attributes and to craft a product that delivers on them has now yielded the first and only touch-free solution to the longstanding challenge of stethoscope contamination.
The innovation process, known as Market Driven Science, has never been deployed for stethoscope hygiene. The current standards of care for stethoscope hygiene (alcohol wipes or disposable stethoscopes) are impractical, ineffective, and pose risks of their own to patients and clinicians. In the case of alcohol wipes, in today’s high-paced clinical workflow, they are seldom used as frequently and for as long as necessary. Even when they are, resistant pathogens like C. diff can persist on the surface of the stethoscope diaphragm.
Regarding disposable, single patient stethoscopes, a recent study showed that these inferior devices deliver compromised sound quality resulting in an 11% rate of incorrect diagnoses, or, in other words, a number needed to harm of just ten patient encounters.
The DiskCover System is the first and only touch-free stethoscope barrier dispensing system. This first-in-class innovation dispenses single-use aseptic disk covers that are proven to protect patients from exposure to harmful pathogens and contaminants on the stethoscope diaphragm without compromising the acoustics critical for accurate diagnoses.
The compact system, designed to be installed at the point of patient care, applies individual disk covers instantly, minimizing workflow disruption while encouraging clinician compliance. It is designed to work with the disposable, cleanroom manufactured Clean Cassette®. Each Clean Cassette houses 420 single-use disk covers and is carefully designed to maintain the aseptic status of each disk cover through to the point of application to the stethoscope.
Incorporating Technology to Deliver a Higher Standard of Care
For AseptiScope, it was critical to embrace the latest technology to realize the vision for a touch-free stethoscope hygiene system. Feedback from its clinical customers indicated that the standards of care were not practical and were ineffective. To be sure its offering was attractive to the market, it was essential for the company to build a system that could be routinely, consistently, and rapidly employed across an array of clinical settings.
Specifically, AseptiScope had to incorporate technology to enable reliable delivery of an aseptic single-use disk cover instantly and in an on-demand, touch-free fashion. Adopting such new technology was critical as the touch-free approach serves as foundation for a pipeline of infection control products beyond stethoscope hygiene.
AseptiScope recognizes and celebrates the renewed emphasis on hand hygiene in clinical settings. With that as a backdrop, the company collaborates with clinical experts to elevate recognition of the stethoscope as the second most potent vector of infection after the clinician’s hands.
Indeed, the stethoscope is used so frequently in the USA, 5.5 billion times per year, that it is frequently referred to as the ‘clinician’s third hand.’ The company’s efforts have contributed to a recent call to action on the CDC, published in a leading clinical journal, to update stethoscope hygiene guidelines.
Facing Unprecedented Times
The pandemic presented AseptiScope with both challenges and opportunities. From a commercial perspective, especially in 2020, the sheer increase in the need for medical services put a strain on its prospective customers’ ability to even hear about the company’s novel, and powerfully relevant, product offering. Now, as the pandemic has receded into the middle of 2021, this challenge has begun to diminish.
Regarding the broader and longer-term impact of the Covid pandemic, AseptiScope has seen an overall increased focus on infection control measures and protocols. It has also seen a growing recognition of the stethoscope as a vector of infection, with several recent important publications in major medical journals. Notably, and as referenced previously, among these is a call to action on the CDC to update stethoscope hygiene guidelines, based on new data and innovations like the DiskCover System, for the first time since 2008.
Heading into a New Dawn
An increased focus on infection prevention is setting a new bar for medical care in wake of the pandemic.
AseptiScope’s touch-free platform is the foundation for a pipeline of products that may eventually set new standards in the infection control and prevention arenas. Ultimately, such new solutions hold the promise to save valuable time, costly resources, and patient lives.
AseptiScope maintains a very close connection with thought leaders in the clinical categories in which it intends to compete. In this fashion, it can identify gaps and build products and services that deliver on the attributes that the market requires. In the coming years, AseptiScope expects to be recognized as the company that established a new standard in, and expectation for, stethoscope hygiene. It also plans to feature a diversified portfolio of additional touch-free infection control products to improve safety for patient safety and clinicians worldwide.