PCN Medical

Antibiotic resistance occurs when bacteria adapt to reduce the effectiveness of drugs, and is expected to be a leading cause of death worldwide by 2050. The use of broader-spectrum antibiotics, such as vancomycin and fluoroquinolones, are known to result in the more resistant organisms connected to antibiotic resistance. In order to combat this, Former President Barack Obama issued a federal mandate for hospitals nationwide to implement antimicrobial stewardship programs over the next 5 years. These broader-spectrum antibiotics are commonly prescribed to the 30 million Americans reporting a penicillin allergy. The problem is that 90% of this population are not actually allergic and as such, are forcing physicians to prescribe these unnecessary alternatives resulting in poor patient outcomes and excessive medical expenditures. This is why most hospitals, in compliance with the federal mandate, are looking to implement penicillin allergy testing on the large-scale. There is currently a gold standard method to penicillin allergy testing with FDA-approved reagents, but only 0.1% of patients reporting a penicillin allergy have been tested because the test is only performed in allergy clinics. It is currently not applicable to the hospital setting due to the lack of time and trained personnel, so patients remain untested. PCN Medical offers a solution that addresses the challenge areas of current penicillin allergy testing and easily fits into the current workflow while still aligning with the accepted gold standard. For the short term, our team is focusing on developing AssistID: an EMR-integrated software application that determines the likeliness of a positive allergy for a patient given their clinical history and an automated precision injection technology. By answering specific questions relating to a patient’s history, the software determines the chances of a positive allergy for each patient. This result then supplies healthcare professionals with the proper information in order to move forward with the best testing and treatment protocol. The automated injection technology consists of a motorized base unit that is compatible with current syringes on the market and utilizes proprietary needle attachments that as a system, inject a solution precisely enough to form the necessary bleb to get a result.