By Zina Moukheiber, Contributor

Kit Check, a one-year-old digital health start-up, raised $10.4 million in a series A round. Life science venture firm New Leaf Venture Partners led the investment, with participation from Sands Capital Ventures, Easton Capital Investment Group, and LionBird. Kit Check is a graduate of Rock Health, a San Francisco-based accelerator. Co-founder Kevin MacDonald is bringing expertise he acquired at Sun Microsystems and other start-ups to apply in hospital settings an old technology used to track inventory in several industries, including health care. By way of radio waves, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) identifies objects that are electronically tagged. General Electric, for example, recently announced it is using RFID to make sure hospital personnel wash their hands. Motorola tracks hospital equipment. Kit Check is applying the technology to automate the tedious process of making sure hospitals’ medication kits are up to date—one of the Joint Commission’s most common citations for non-compliance. On average, 20% of kits contain drugs that have expired. By chance, MacDonald came upon that glaringly inefficient process over dinner with a friend, a hospital pharmacist. She complained about the mind-numbing task of manually sifting through medication kits to look for drugs past their expiration date—something a barcode doesn’t provide. Hospitals typically keep between 20 and 50 kits for emergencies such as cardiac arrest, or anesthesia, and each kit contains between 20 and 200 medications for those specific situations. Two pharmacy staffers are assigned the task of verifying kits. “It’s the worst job in the pharmacy,” says MacDonald, who was inspired to form Kit Check. …read more

Source: FULL ARTICLE at Forbes Latest