A privately-owned Canadian company headquartered in Richmond, BC, bioLytical now sells and markets its INSTI® HIV-1/2 Antibody Test, including a self-test version which allows users to test in the privacy of their own homes. Its line-up of one-minute INSTI® tests can diagnose infectious diseases like COVID-19, HIV, hepatitis C, and syphilis with speedy, precise results, which have received worldwide regulatory approval, including the US FDA, Health Canada, and the CE mark in Europe.

The INSTI® platform offers vital point-of-care diagnostic tests that are both quick and extremely accurate using advanced flow-through technology, delivering a result in 60 seconds or less, bringing invaluable clinical and financial advantages to patients, healthcare providers, and public health organizations.

“From the beginning, we’ve been an industry leader in HIV diagnostics with our one-minute platform INSTI® and our flagship HIV products. The importance of an accurate and fast assay was the main reason bioLytical was founded,” says Rob Mackie, President and CEO.

“With flow-through technology, we give more results in less time with one sample. Historically, it has been a challenge to have multiple results on a lateral flow platform which, due to the way the platforms are designed, flows over your antigens, leading to a possible degradation of the sample.”

Currently, approximately 36.4 million people are living with HIV worldwide, and many don’t know they have it.

“We need people to know their status so they can connect to suitable anti-retroviral treatment, or ART, to live a quality life; the by-product is that we help to dramatically decrease new infections by significantly reducing the chances of onward transmission,” Mackie says. “That’s why testing for HIV and early detection is so important, and it has been our focus since inception.”

bioLytical’s success includes not only the world’s fastest HIV and syphilis rapid tests but also its ability to determine what diagnostics are in demand worldwide. One example is the recent surge across North America in hepatitis C infections. Since the development of affordable and effective treatment, testing for hep C has become more vital to connecting patients to care. However, more recently, treatment has become affordable for insurers and the average patient, increasing demand for an accurate and accessible hepatitis C test.

“When treatment costs tens of thousands of dollars, there is less urgency to develop a rapid test,” says Mackie. “It’s very challenging to give somebody a result if there is no easy or accessible remedy due to a lack of resources. Now that treatment is covered and reasonably priced, we can focus more on diagnostics.”

The INSTI® platform’s high-quality hepatitis C test is comparable to its industry-leading INSTI® HIV test, with over 99.96 percent accuracy. “Our research and development team has done an outstanding job fine-tuning a highly effective hep C test,” Mackie says.

At the moment, hep C testing in Canada is performed in a professional format called a POCT (point-of-care test) where a doctor, pharmacist or medical professional administers the test, but self-testing could “change this dramatically,” allowing customers to purchase a test kit at a drug store and test themselves at home.

“We are the first company in Canadian history to receive an HIV self-test approval using our INSTI® platform, and the hepatitis C test uses the same innovative technology approved for ease of use for a self-test in HIV,” says Mackie.

The company has gained professional-use approval for its hepatitis C test across Europe and expects to receive WHO prequalification soon. Mackie plans to also launch in North America this year.

While bioLytical is ready to address hep C, much as it has taken a bite out of the HIV sector, COVID-19, unfortunately, put everything on hold for close to three years. However, that delay helped the company fine-tune its marketing approach to address the right demographics of a world suffering from different diseases.

“What sets us apart from our larger competitors is that bioLytical can pivot on a moment’s notice to take advantage of opportunities that otherwise might be missed,” Mackie says. “With us being a private company, we’re growing quite rapidly, representing our region strongly. But we continue to keep ourselves nimble and agile, able to react on our feet to different healthcare challenges, such as the hep C situation.”

While bioLytical knew there was a huge opportunity with hep C, they discovered a largely untapped market in India and Africa for hepatitis B. Subsequently, the company is developing a hep B test performed on the new lateral flow platform, originally developed for COVID-19.

“It is serendipitous how things unfold. Hep B was never on our radar; it was not a focus before COVID-19,” Mackie says. “We were planning to work on a lateral-flow HIV-confirmatory test for the WHO but ended up pivoting toward COVID-19 to help our country fight the virus, as any other local company would.”

During its efforts to make a COVID-19 antibody test on the INSTI® platform, bioLytical developed a new antigen platform called iStatis which lends itself to detecting hep B antigens more effectively due to the nature of the virus.

Despite adversity, including shutting down for seven months during the height of COVID-19, the company persevered. “I think bioLytical and the HIV industry have both been fortunate, and I think it’s all because the world needs the products bioLytical develops,” says Mackie.

“We have an amazing and successful company with a great culture and family here with our employees. Now, three years later, we are three times the company, we have launched a new platform, and we feel that we can face any challenge head-on,” Mackie says.

“If we can’t figure it out on INSTI®, we’ll figure it out on iStatis. We went from having an antibody-based platform to also having an antigen-based platform, and as such, bioLytical is confident it can develop new assays for the ever-changing healthcare needs.”

Unfortunately, COVID-19 created other adverse effects, including a significant increase in HIV infections due to testing being severely hampered, something that regions worldwide are seeing the impact of this year.

Mackie says, “We are seeing infectious rates equal to the rates a decade ago—which reiterates the importance of knowing your status to connect to care and reduce onward transmission. However, to regain the progress we made won’t take as long as it took us to get there in the beginning.”

This is due in part to the pandemic introducing more people to rapid testing and the use of self-testing as a favourable option for people to investigate ways to keep themselves safe without the aid of doctors or leaders—a new tool to help manage health as the world learned more about the novel virus and what worked to help prevent and keep people safe. “Self-testing goes right along with people taking more responsibility,” he adds.

“It’s unfortunate this wasn’t adopted earlier because our health is the most important thing we have and, therefore, the great equalizer. Without health, we have nothing.”

He adds that education is also key, particularly when breaking down stigma. For years HIV was associated solely with drug use and lifestyle choices, misplacing the blame on the patient. There was little to no focus on other methods of transmission—for example, blood transfusions.

“HIV is transmitted through six bodily fluids, and an overlooked infectious place is your gums,” Mackie says. “You can get HIV by sharing a toothbrush if both partners have bleeding gums or sores, and many people don’t know that.”

While Mackie is not discounting the need for great doctors and lower wait times, self-testing allows patients to take responsibility for their health by managing it instead of immediately seeing a doctor whenever there’s an issue. Being proactive and having access to valuable information leads to making informed health decisions and providing some reassurance at the same time.

“We are excited for the months and years ahead of us,” says Mackie. “What the pandemic has taught us is how easy, accurate, and available rapid tests are to use and how important early detection is,” he says.

“With INSTI®, you can take our test and find out if you have hep C in just one minute and get connected to care. Treatment is now through oral pills, taken daily for two to six months. The medication is highly effective with a 95 percent success rate, helping patients rid the disease and lead healthy lives.”

Conversely, if you find you have hep C through symptoms, treatment may be more difficult, possibly leading to the need for lifelong dialysis, costing upwards of hundreds of thousands of dollars over a patient’s lifetime. “It is a terrible disease; left untreated, the virus can lead to severe liver disease. Often known as a silent killer, it can lead to painful suffering for those impacted by the disease.”

STIs are costly, and potentially deadly diseases are rife around the world. Africa spends tens of billions a year to treat a significant number of new cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea each year. Many global regions are seeing historical surges in STIs, such as syphilis. Mississippi alone saw an increase of over 900 percent in congenital syphilis over the past six years.

“Sexually transmitted diseases are not going away, so it is important to have proper protocols,” Mackie says. “Managing your own health is part and parcel, so we’ve put a lot of effort into our online presence, including our social media and websites, taking it upon ourselves to spread awareness for testing and infectious diseases.”

Along with a host of notable lifesaving inventions and best-in-show base platforms, bioLytical is also an industry leader, a rare achievement for a Canadian biotech company.

“We’re not buying from China and repackaging with a maple leaf, like many competitors,” Mackie says. “INSTI® and iStatis are 100 percent developed in-house, right down to our antigens. We start with a proprietary cell bank and develop our antigens here at bioLytical. We do our plastic injection here locally, so there’s no supply chain risk of disruption. That was a big thing, too.”

With the ultimate goal of everything eventually being available for self-testing, bioLytical envisions the future of health care as being in the hands of the people themselves for early diagnosis and management.

“The future is bright for us in rapid testing,” says Mackie. “With our two platforms and amazing research and development team, we’re confident that we are nimble, fast, and highly accurate, capable of reacting with agility to address some of the world’s most severe health challenges.”

The post Hands-On Healthcare<p class="company">bioLytical Laboratories</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Signed into law by President Joe Biden last August, the Act will see some $280 billion in new funding for the domestic research and manufacturing of semiconductors in America. The bipartisan legislative package will see greater investment in America’s semiconductor research, manufacturing and supply chains, and job creation.

For President and Chief Executive Officer Bill Stuart and the team at Photodigm, seeing the enthusiasm on the Congressman’s face and hearing the excitement in his voice during the tour was further assurance the company is on the right track.

“We were incredibly honored and grateful to have Congressman Colin Allred visit Photodigm,” Stuart said during the tour. “It’s clear that he understands the crucial importance of our innovative semiconductor chip technology and is incredibly quick to grasp the real-world challenges companies like ours face as we scale production of our leading-edge photonic chips to meet customer demand.”

100% American-owned
Stuart is quick to praise his staff past and present. Before coming on board about a year and a half ago, he spent some 30 years in technology, mainly on the software side until a decade ago, when he set up a venture fund and conducted private investing in hardware-related companies, including Photodigm.

During the COVID-19 crisis, many businesses were affected by supply chain issues and disruptions. Not a day went by without news of the worldwide computer chip shortage, and how it was causing backlogs for everything from electronic games to pickup trucks. Present-day vehicles have come to include dozens of sensor modules requiring numerous microchips, often thousands per car or truck. So no chips meant millions upon millions of dollars’ worth of vehicles sitting incomplete at factories.

As Photodigm is entirely American-owned and predominantly sourced within the United States, it didn’t face the supply chain hurdles that others did during the pandemic, a key difference. And since the company is under U.S. ownership, Photodigm can sell to the strictly regulated American defense industry, and all large manufacturing related to defense, because they are incentivized to buy American.

“It gives us a lot of flexibility, and it gives them the assurance that their intellectual property is maintained, and the differentiation is maintained,” says Stuart, adding that more companies are now doing business with the U.S. operations instead of China or Russia.

Unlike dealing with offshore entities, Photodigm clients can visit the Texas-based facility, and see for themselves how fixed-wavelength semiconductor lasers are made. “They want to get comfortable with a smaller company being part of their value chain, and it helps that we’re right here.”

Rooted in education
After two decades, Photodigm remains the only commercial semiconductor manufacturer of single spatial and longitudinal mode DBR (Distributed Bragg Reflector) laser diodes, an important consideration in a strategic sector such as this.

Today, these DBR lasers are critical for many applications, including atomic clocks, laser spectroscopy, optical metrology, and quantum sensing.

What became Photodigm in 2000 was originally a part of Southern Methodist University’s (SMU) photonics lab. In its early days, the company built niche lasers “in a custom job shop kind of way for a handful of customers,” according to Stuart, who compares it to auto maker Porsche in the 1990s, when cars were assembled using different parts.

Once Stuart came on board, big changes were introduced, including how the company scaled manufacturing. “We’ve changed that now to where we are on volume manufacturing,” he says. “Instead of making four or five units for a professor at a university, we now make 300 to 400 lasers at a time and sell those to a myriad of customers around the world. That became our focus.”

In the past year alone, Photodigm made 4,000 lasers. This year will see the production of 7,000 to 8,000, and likely 15,000 in 2024. The market is strong, and to meet demand, Photodigm will grow from a high-end custom niche builder to a company producing many more units while maintaining the same level of quality, if not better.

And because the company is scaling up production, it has lowered its unit cost and announced dramatic price reductions on some products. “We’ll continue to do that to get our technology into the hands of a lot more people who can’t afford several thousand dollars for one laser,” says Stuart.

Strength and talent
A strong and talented team helps Stuart lead Photodigm. This includes Dr. Annie Xiang, Senior Vice President of Quality Management and Customer Success. A trained electrical engineer holding a Ph.D. and an MBA, she started in fiber-optic telecom before joining Photodigm in 2012, focusing on the laser as a source component.

Her responsibilities include supervising the back-end process, testing, qualification, customer product specifications, and supporting success. “I’ve observed our company from trying to get a process to be stabilized, to the last two years of the transformation that’s grown into a full-scale manufacturing production environment. Very exciting,” she says.

Recently Xiang was recognized as one of the Top Women in Technology by the Dallas Business Journal for her role at the company—which itself was honored last year as one of the top semiconductor manufacturing solutions providers by Semiconductor Review Magazine.

Dr. Preston Young is Photodigm’s Chief Technology Officer and has been with the company for over fifteen years. He holds a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and holds three patents awarded, with others pending, for his contributions. Most of Dr. Young’s research focuses on the design and fabrication of resonant optical and microwave diffractive and waveguide grating structures with emphasis on their incorporation into semiconductor lasers.

Leading the company’s cutting-edge research and development projects with the United States Office of Naval Research and other key customers is Tom Clifford, Photodigm’s Vice President of Project Management, who brings extensive experience in driving strategy, reconfiguring and managing operations, and technology and management consulting.

Rounding off the team is Mandy Eaton, who joined the company last July. As Vice President of Marketing and Communications, she brings years of brand strategy, public relations, communications, strategic planning, and change-management expertise to Photodigm.

Turbo-charging its successful trajectory, the company hired 19 of its 30 staff in just the past year. Some were brought straight from trade school and high school at the technician level and were put through Photodigm’s own training curriculum, Semiconductor Manufacturing 101, and given the opportunity for growth in a good paying job.

As one would expect considering its origins in SMU, Photodigm fosters great partnerships with academia. “600 customers are universities themselves,” says Stuart. “Every major photonics physics lab in the country has our lasers in it, which is a very intentional strategy.”

Believing passionately in education, the company has invested millions of dollars in research carried out for them by universities, putting a lot of students to work. Earlier this year, Stuart was invited to a seat on the Southern Methodist University Lyle School of Engineering Industrial Advisory Board.

This prestigious Board includes executives from other leading companies, including Texas Instruments, Ericsson, Qualcomm, and BCG. “It’s an honor to be asked,” Stuart said then. “I am hoping I can contribute in a real way to such a prestigious engineering school. The collaboration of private industry with world-class universities is imperative for the development of world-class engineering leaders facing tomorrow’s challenges.”

Joe Camp, interim department chair of SMU Lyle’s Electrical and Computer Engineering Department, said at the same time how honored he was to have Stuart join the Advisory Board.

Accurate to a billionth of a meter
Unlike mainstream lasers, Photodigm’s Distributed Bragg Reflector (DBR) laser diodes are remarkably accurate. According to the company, Photodigm’s DBR lasers “are each produced as a single-frequency laser diode ranging from 700 to 1100 nanometers (nm), accurate to the nearest billionth of a meter and capable of converting electrical current into light for specific wavelengths required to stimulate unique elements in the periodic table. They are so small that 500 DBR lasers can fit on an average-sized thumbnail.”

Owing to their size, precision, and quality, DBR laser diodes are used in laser spectroscopy, cold atom optics, atomic clocks, biomedical frequency-resolved diagnostics, quantum sensing, optical metrology, and many other areas.

Some of the more unusual uses for the company’s DBRs in devices are to identify the exact color red in a painting by French Impressionist artist Claude Monet for restoration, and, in cultural forensics, to detect frauds. Photodigm’s laser diodes have also been used to remove graffiti from rock paintings in an Indigenous cultural area in West Texas, and even to determine the amount of rust on bridge I-beams to identify areas that may fail soon.

“The accuracy of our laser allows them to get down to that level of identification,” says Stuart, who is also excited about new applications on the horizon. He believes that in a few years, lasers in iPhones and Androids will do more than facial recognition, telling users about the quality and moisture content of their of skin, forehead temperature, and skin pigment as we age.

“All sorts of things are going to become diagnostic in terms of tools associated with fixed wavelength lasers,” he says, adding that one customer already uses Photodigm lasers in technology to identify and confirm the content of prescription drugs through light signatures, sending back alerts through software if there are issues.

With all the company’s innovation, President and CEO Stuart is quick to credit his enthusiastic team at Photodigm. “History shows great companies attract great people,” he says. “I’m not saying we’re a great company yet, but we are a growing company with significant growth and significant upside. All of our technicians—whether they came from fast food jobs, nail salons, or major universities as Ph.D. students—have stock in the company,” he shares.

“It’s being run like a software start-up because that’s my background, and we’re changing the way the community looks at us versus other players. We’re in a really interesting time with all the challenges going on in manufacturing and globally. It’s nice to come in, focus on something, and feel like you’re actually making a hell of a difference. I think our team is incredibly grateful for that.”

The post Light Fantastic<p class="company">Photodigm</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Addressing every sector of the pharmacy market, including health systems, hospital inpatient pharmacies, outpatient pharmacies, long-term care institutions, and government pharmacies, ARxIUM offers comprehensive and scalable pharmacy solutions by rethinking and redefining how pharmacies operate within healthcare ecosystems, ultimately contributing to better patient care and improved healthcare outcomes.

ARxIUM offers customers in all pharmacy environments a comprehensive selection of pharmacy technology available by combining resources, products, and expertise in an effort to increase patient safety, boost workflow effectiveness, and lower operating costs.

With the goal of making medication dispensing easier and safer, ARxIUM RxWorks™ Pro software helps pharmacies operate more efficiently and effectively by tracking medications across the enterprise. This means the software can handle inventory management and replenishment, packing, storage, and accounting / transactions, allowing hospitals and health systems to view, track, monitor, and act upon their inventory of medications within one hospital or across the entire health system.

“It’s a very difficult operational environment for pharmacy leaders who are trained to be clinicians, not supply chain experts, to keep track of all the medications—what they have, where they’re located, how much they have on hand in terms of quantity and dollar value for each drug,” explains Nhat H. Ngo, Owner and Chief Executive Officer of ARxIUM. “It’s a real challenge every day and is too much for anyone to manage well without the right technologies. Making matters worse are the severe staffing shortages hospitals and health systems are experiencing today.”

RxWorks provides users enterprise-wide visibility to see where medications are located, enabling pharmacists and their teams to create orders to replenish inventory at any given inventory-carrying location.

“It’s a sophisticated system that’s much-needed in the health system today,” says Ngo. “Sometimes it’s a life-and-death situation if you don’t have the right medication on hand when you need it.”

He recounts a story of a set of twins who urgently needed a drug that, due to a lack of enterprise visibility, couldn’t be found within the health system. This situation required the medical team to choose an alternative medication which led to a very serious adverse patient outcome. The hospital later learned that one of its sister hospitals, just a few miles down the road and part of the same IDN (integrated delivery network), had the medication.

“If they’d had enterprise-wide medication inventory visibility, this could have been prevented.”

In short, RxWorks improves patient safety by ensuring medication availability, having the right drugs when needed while also helping to manage and deliver on the five rights of medication management.

“The five ‘rights’ are the right patient getting the right drug at the right time, at the right dose through the right route,” says Ngo. “And this system enables the inventory management required to ensure the availability of the right drug, and particularly at the right time.”

Connected to RxWorks is a system of smart conveyance solutions to support a fast-growing trend in healthcare, the growth of Consolidated Service Centers to consolidate and centralize pharmacy operations to better support the enterprise. Think of hub and spoke—such a system is particularly effective for central fill and mail order prescription fulfillment operations. The idea is when you have a large health system with multiple hospitals and clinics, you need to be able to procure drugs on a consolidated basis. “Doing so optimizes the supply chain while ensuring that medications are distributed more efficiently,” Ngo says. “But more importantly, it’s the idea that you can optimize the entire medication distribution process from beginning to end.”

If a large health system has 10 hospital sites, for example, and each location procures a very expensive drug that comes in a box of 10 vials, and each vial is $1,000, it’s $10,000 per box. Each hospital buys their own box, but not all of the vials will get used by the expiration date.

“They use maybe half, and the rest goes unused and expires, and then they buy the next batch—so a lot of waste,” Ngo says. “But if you buy at a central location—a Consolidated Service Center (CSC)—and you distribute vials to the 10 hospitals, you can monitor the usages. Hospital A gets six, hospital B gets two, hospital C gets eight, depending on their usage, rather than each hospital buying individually and wasting the rest.”

Drug expiration is a big issue as health systems are very inefficient at managing expiration dates, resulting in many wasted drugs, he adds.

With RxWorks, users connect to a smart conveyance system that operates the entire central distribution process. Not only is there visibility to the drugs, but the clinics and hospitals can create requisitions for more drugs with the CSC filling those orders. The required hardware is the combination of a conveyance system and OptiFill™, a principal high-volume vial-filling solution that can handle over 20,000 daily prescriptions at each site. While OptiFill technology plays a significant role, the ARxIUM specialized software makes it work. Referred to as PPS, it acts as the “brain” of any OptiFill system configuration, managing workflow.

“It takes in different types of drugs and fills the drugs into vials and sends them to inventory carrying locations,” Ngo says. “You can do it for inpatient CSC for self-distribution, outpatient central fill, or mail to home operations.”

At the enterprise software visibility level, you’re able to see the orders and work to fulfill them with elegant workflows embedded in RxWorks, he adds. Then the pharmacy technician acts on the orders, with the pharmacy manager approving the order and a pharmacist verifying the fulfillment, as a safety check, all in RxWorks.

How do we get more pharmacies to move to this system? Is it cost or simply creating awareness of the benefits it could bring? “I think there’s certainly awareness,” Ngo says. Called a centralized pharmacy service center, consolidated pharmacy service center, or CPSC, the concept has been talked about since 2015, but only recently gained more traction.

“I’d say in the last few years, health systems [have been] thinking about setting up the CSCs,” Ngo says. Why? The drugs are very expensive, arguably the most expensive in a hospital operating budget, and costs have been rising by double digits over the last five years. “The idea of the CSC mainly has been driven by the need to deliver on important clinical initiatives, improve efficiencies, and reduce costs,” he says.

Certainly, there’s a lot of cost pressure on a health system. 2022 was a very tough year financially for many health systems—their performance was down 38 percent relative to 2021—and the forecast for 2023 is that approximately 70 percent of health systems are either going to break even or will be operating at a loss.

“That’s where the need for ARxIUM RxWorks, OptiFill, and smart conveyance systems come in,” says Ngo, “to design, set up, and run these CSCs. Combined, our connected solutions and expertise in pharmacy workflows help health system leaders achieve their vision for a CSC.”

On the patient safety and precision side, the RIVA™ system has become the standard when it comes to robotic sterile IV compounding. A fully automated IV compounding system created for hospital pharmacies, RIVA consistently and precisely produces IV syringes and bags, solving patient and pharmacy technician safety concerns, overall pharmacy efficiency, and ongoing regulatory environment obstacles by automating a significant part of the sterile compounding process.

“We’re very proud of our RIVA system,” says Ngo. “What sets the RIVA system apart and differentiates it in the marketplace is its accuracy and reliability. RIVA has accurately and safely prepared more than 14 million doses across all installations. It’s just very reliable.”

Finally, the MedSelect™ automated dispensing cabinets (ADC) from ARxIUM—together with a wide range of additional technologies intended to expand functionality—improve fulfillment accuracy and boost overall facility efficiency, lowering medication errors, controlling costs, complying with regulatory bodies, and boosting employee productivity. “It’s for pharmacy and nursing, to make sure medications are placed throughout the hospitals so nurses can take care of their patients by having access to the drugs when they’re needed,” Ngo says.

Think of ADCs as an ATM, says Ngo, where a nurse puts in their ID to access the medications. “You click on the patient whose drugs are due at noon, and cabinet drawers open and the bins open,” he says. “The nurse takes the medications and administers those medications to the patient.”

These ADCs can be placed on the surgery floor, in the ICU, and in the ER. “It’s another way to deliver on the five rights of medication management, having the right drugs available to the right patient,” says Ngo.

Holistically it all works together, from the supply chain to the RxWorks software and the smart conveyance CSC solutions that receive the drugs from the wholesaler. If you need a drug, you can see where this particular dose is located at your 10 hospitals or 300 clinics.

“I think what makes ARxIUM special is our single technology platform, and all hardware products, even competing solutions, can connect to this platform,” Ngo explains. “Having a connected system work that works well together is a beautiful thing, and RxWorks is the brain and backbone to make that happen.”

Along with the best-in-class RIVA, ARxIUM believes its combination of RxWorks and the smart conveyance system uniquely positions the company to partner with health systems as they implement consolidated service centers in the coming years. “We believe we have a game changer,” Ngo says. “Given the financial pressures facing health systems, pharmacies can utilize ARxIUM solutions to reduce cost while repositioning strategically as a revenue and profit center.”

Eight to 10 percent of a hospital’s annual drug budget is being wasted due to drug expiration or diverted. For a $100 million annual drug spend, for example, the cost of waste is substantial. With the ARxIUM systems, “you can ensure that significantly more of the drug budget is actually used for patient care. When I visit hospital pharmacies, they have waste bins for expired medications,” Ngo says. “There has to be a better way. It’s a huge opportunity to automate and optimize manual workflows, eliminate operational headaches, and make sure medications are available when patients need them.”

Ngo says he’s particularly proud not only of having the solution and technology, but the ARxIUM ability to support clinicians to provide quality patient care, while doing so at a reduced cost.

“We do that through our people, and our people have very deep knowledge and expertise and understanding of pharmacy workflows,” he says. “I’m super excited about the positive impact we’re making in healthcare. ARxIUM is delivering compelling next-generation solutions that are taking pharmacy operations to the next level.”

The post Game Changer: Making Medication Dispensing Easier, Faster, Safer<p class="company">ARxIUM</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

Through alliances with an increasing number of suppliers and by purchasing regional and national distributors—most notably Ingram & Bell Scientific in 1994—ESBE is dedicated to offering the scientific community high-quality goods and expert services at reasonable costs.

With an eye to environmental preservation, ESBE is also committed to collaborating with businesses that make energy-efficient machinery, develop environmentally friendly solutions for consumables and packaging, use environmentally friendly production techniques, and support Green programs in the workplace and the community.

In fact, in addition to minimizing, reusing, and recycling waste whenever possible, ESBE has solar panels installed on the roof of its head office and warehouse.

ESBE has a long and impressive history serving the Canadian scientific community. For more than five decades it has been bringing the latest innovations and technological advances, providing quality products and professional services at competitive prices.

“My dad bought the existing business of ESBE Laboratory Supplies in 1968,” says President Laurel Wiseman. “He was an engineer by trade, and he worked for a number of companies, the last one being Westinghouse.”

After he was laid off, her father went back to school and got into the law field, but he always wanted to be his own boss. When he and a colleague found ESBE for sale, it seemed a perfect opportunity. “My dad quickly realized he didn’t want to work with a partner, he wanted to work for himself. So he bought the partner out.”

Located on Bathurst Street, ESBE initially also had a retail store where it sold birthday gifts, says Wiseman.

“Then my father hired some really good people, which I think was really the key for him, particularly his first sales manager, a woman, who, for that time in the late 60s, was really quite interesting. My dad couldn’t care less what the gender was, as long as they were great at what they did.”

A medical technologist who wanted to get out of the lab, she got the business off the ground, expanded it and spent her entire working career with ESBE, says Wiseman.

“I think this speaks to the culture of being a family, and the inclusiveness of the place,” she adds. Wiseman herself joined the company in 1986 and has since expanded the business “by leaps and bounds” across both its product mix and customer base. Part of its success over half a century, she says, has been the company’s trust in and commitment to its long-serving, highly knowledgeable salespeople, earning in return loyalty and dedication. That continues unchanged.

“That speaks to who we are and the culture we are,” Wiseman says.

In terms of innovation and technology, Wiseman’s father was also innovative in his way, adds Michael Ratos, Vice President of Sales & Marketing.

“He created moulds for some of the urine tubes currently used in the market. He saw a need and he created something,” Ratos says. And when the company early embraced environmental issues, ESBE was the first to put up solar panels, long before sustainability became an industry-wide credo.

Along with its commitment to energy-saving green practices, the company’s ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) system—the brain and nerves of a distributor—saves time and money for the company and its customers.

“A lot of our customers are in a fast-paced industry,” says Ratos. “They require things fast and our system allows us to do this.”

Some examples include Punch-Out, a digital system that enables clients to browse the company’s product catalogues online before making purchases through the client’s e-procurement system. “Currently, we’re integrating a lot of the universities and other accounts with Punch-Out,” says Ratos.

With its perspective on innovation and organizational excellence, ESBE had moved its phones to a VoIP system even before the pandemic. “We were a bit ahead of the game with that,” says Ratos.

In the same way, ESBE chooses to partner with innovative companies, including PHCbi (formerly Panasonic Healthcare Holdings Co., Ltd.), a leader in incubation and preservation, Hettich, a German company that has won numerous awards for innovation globally, and Irish company Randox, a longtime key supplier in the diagnostic division.

Then there’s Montreal-based Galenvs, the only company in Canada producing magnetic bead technology, which was highly in demand during COVID for PCR extractions.

“We’re excited to work with them because they developed everything in Canada, and with us being a Canadian company, the partnership and the synergies were there for the market,” Ratos says, adding that a lot of these companies are at the forefront of their technologies around the globe and that it’s ESBE that’s bringing them to the Canadian market.

“One of the reasons they pick us over the large multinationals is they know we’ll treat their products with respect, as opposed to the larger companies who put them into their portfolio and maybe they’ll get to it,” Wiseman says. “They know we’re going to focus on it, that our salespeople are going to focus, and they know their customers want their product. I’m honoured when they pick us versus someone else.”

ESBE continues to look for suppliers that embrace sustainability and has brought on board many that have a record of reducing a large amount of wastage in the community. “When you look into the scientific industry, there’s a lot of wastage in consumables, so we do our best to look for suppliers that reduce that as well,” Ratos says.

This results in dollars and cents for customers, and as a Canadian company, ESBE is always very sensitive to taxpayer dollar waste, says Wiseman. “If we can do something in our own way to save them money, then we’re for it.”

These are all recipes for success, but there’s more to ESBE’s story.

“The engine behind us is our people,” says Ratos. “It’s a family-style kind of operation, but we’re very corporate in how we manage our business. We treat people like they’re part of the family, but they know at the end of the day we have to produce the numbers and results for ourselves.”

Ratos adds that three legs support the organization and keep it rock-steady, the first being customer-centricity. ESBE continues to make decisions based on the customer and how every aspect impacts the customer.

“That’s important to us because that’s how we drive loyalty,” he says. “We do have a lot of loyal customers, and that customer-centricity is driven across the entire organization from our salespeople to our operation, even to our finance people.”

The second leg is supplier engagement. For instance, ESBE won’t be a company that takes on a million suppliers and loses sight of what matters to customers. “We don’t want to create too much competition among suppliers, but at the same time we want to give our customers choice,” says Ratos. “We actually reduced the number of suppliers so we could form stronger partnerships with them.”

In addition, offering too many choices can be overwhelming. ESBE handles this by reducing the number of suppliers it has to key suppliers only, and who are making quality products.

“Anything a customer buys from us, we stand behind, from a service and quality perspective,” Ratos says. “We’re one of the few companies in our industry that have in-house service, giving our customers peace of mind that whenever they buy anything from ESBE, there’s a service team that stands behind it.”

The third and last leg of the three-legged stool is operational excellence. The company’s Vice President of Operations and Regulatory Affairs, Ari Pires, does a “phenomenal” job in management, promoting customer focus, including the ERP system. Operational excellence, Ratos says, involves doing what the customer wants, delivering when they want, the accuracy rate, the timings, and reducing the number of errors.

“It’s also going that extra mile for a customer. If a customer calls and says they didn’t get their shipment, most other companies will put them into the queue and get to them whenever. Not here. We take it personally, and I think our customer loyalty reflects that.”

Part of ESBE’s dedication to providing quality products lies with its five product managers and two agents that work globally, allowing the company to source the world for products that meet customer needs. Product managers and agents bring quality products to ESBE’s table where they go through an internal vetting process, validation, and quality control before they’re sent to customers.

“Once we’re happy with a product, before launching it or introducing the market, we’ll pick customers we know very well that will help try out the products we’re going to onboard,” Ratos says. Once products pass the customer test, ESBE starts launching into the market, confident they have achieved their high standard of quality.

Ratos adds that the high-tenured service component of the organization is also a critical part of the company, bringing vital reassurance to customers.

“These guys are phenomenal,” he says. “I can’t overemphasize the quality of our service technicians and our service team in providing peace of mind for our customers.”

Ratos also praises the company’s sourcing team, which tackled numerous challenges during COVID, including the stoppage of testing kits from U.S. vendors.

“They chose not to supply Canada with critical products we needed for testing and protecting ourselves,” he says. “Our global sourcing team was able to find the product, and we were able to comply with the government requests and provide them with the kits they needed to do all the testing required during the pandemic—even the provincial and federal governments.

“It was key for us. That’s one of our biggest competencies—that we were able to help the Canadian government when they needed us. We all take pride in that.”

ESBE also helped track down cold storage units for the vaccines when they were initially developed. “Again, it just goes to show that as a Canadian company, we bend over backwards for our customers.”

In late 2020, Wiseman was interviewed by Global News following an announcement by The Honourable Anita Anand, Minister of National Defence and former Minister of Public Services and Procurement, that ESBE Scientific had been awarded a contract to supply Canada with PHCbi -86°C freezers to be used to store COVID-19 vaccines. ESBE answered the call and delivered over 30 freezers (-86°C and -30°C) to the Public Health Agency of Canada without any delay. These freezers were delivered to every Province and Territory in Canada in preparation for the COVID-19 vaccine roll-out.

As ESBE is a distributor, not a manufacturer, it scours the world for products, but there’s always the risk of doing too good a job, prompting offshore suppliers to decide to sell products direct.

“There’s always somebody looking over our shoulder,” says Wiseman. “If you don’t have a proper partnership with your major suppliers, there’s always that risk and it’s happened once or twice to us. Our job is to make sure the manufacturers understand the value we bring that they can’t do on their own if they want to go direct.”

What does ESBE hope to achieve in the upcoming years? The company is heavily focused on the clinical market and is doing an extremely good job there, says Ratos, but it’s looking forward to expanding into the academic and biotechnology markets.

“We offer great products and great service, we’ve just never gone full force into these different market segments,” he says. “Those two areas will be my next challenge and milestones.”

It’s all about meeting clients’ needs for different products, sourcing them, bringing them to market, and keeping customers happy, all of which ESBE excels at. “We’re proud to be Canadian, and proud to be female-owned,” says Ratos. “I don’t know too many companies in our industry or in the market that are female-owned.”

The company’s succession plan for the next few years includes Wiseman passing the torch to her daughter. Until then, Wiseman will continue to uphold ESBE’s commitment to quality and customer service across the board.

“It reflects the positive culture of our workplace,” she says. “Gender doesn’t matter here. We’re all colleagues working together to get the job done. But I agree with Mike that our culture is truly special and unlike any other.”

The post Innovation, Sustainability, and Customer Care<p class="company">ESBE Scientific</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.

The iWALKFree is an FDA-registered crutch alternative offering unmatched mobility and releasing users from the grind, pain, and hassle of traditional crutches and knee scooters.

Whether you have a sprained ankle, Achilles injury, fractured foot or ankle, lower leg amputation, or any other non-weight-bearing lower leg injury, iWALKFree is a crutch substitute that offers an unparalleled level of movement, carrying out daily tasks and regaining freedom.

In 1999, a farmer from Ontario fell from his roof and broke his ankle. There’s no time off in farming, so, unable to do his chores on traditional crutches, he propped his knee on a stool and continued working. That was when the idea that it would be great if the stool could just move around with him popped up.

He built the original iWALKFree prototype from wood in less than an hour after his moment of creative insight. It allowed full use of his hands and arms, along with support for his injury, granting him unique independence and activity throughout his recovery.

Sunnybrook Health Science Center in Toronto, one of the top North American centers for orthopedic research, took note of the device, leading the company to pursue clinical trials and patent protection.

They next developed and refined the design with the help of experienced technical and medical advisors, and Health Canada’s Therapeutic Goods Program granted the iWALKFree crutch a Medical Device Establishment License.

The Canadian Minister of Health gave the iWALKFree crutch its approval in 1999 and it was released to Canadian customers in June 2000, followed by CE certification in Europe and registration with the FDA as a medical device in the U.S.

“Like a lot of different companies, the iWALK started by accident,” says President Brad Hunter, referencing the founder’s fall and ankle break. “And from those humble beginnings, we’re now where we are today.”

When Hunter came on board, he himself had just hurt his ankle and was on crutches for the first time in his life. “I had no idea just how limiting they were,” he says. “I couldn’t even get through my day. I couldn’t do anything.”

With a background in manufacturing, Hunter recognized both the opportunities and challenges of the product and also how to scale it out. Since his involvement, iWALKFree is now available around the world.

“If you’ve been on crutches, you know how hard it is. Every little thing is difficult whether just trying to get through a door, go up and down stairs, cook in your kitchen, walk your dog, push a shopping cart, or work. Everything is difficult or impossible.”

The iWALKFree device is attached to the injured leg at the knee, essentially acting as a healthy lower limb. When walking, you’re using the same muscle memory and walking mechanisms you’ve used your entire life, says Hunter, as has been proven through clinical research. Once you grasp how to use it by adjusting your gait, you learn and adapt very quickly.

The company also provides instructional videos to help users make necessary height adjustments, along with a range of other considerations including leg shape and stance. “But it’s way easier than you think it’s going to be and it’s amazing,” Hunter says.

“There are a lot of things you’ve never thought about: for example, are you knock-kneed? Or bow-legged? You probably don’t know,” he says. “We’ve designed it so that you have all those controls, and you can tailor it to mimic your own leg’s geometry.”

While traditional crutches or a scooter may appear to provide stability, the iWALK is easier to balance on, as was proven through university research. It may look unfamiliar and call for minor adaptation to your existing skill set for walking, but in practice, the iWALKFree crutch boasts an impeccable safety record. In fact, it’s proven to be safer than either crutches or knee scooters.

“There are preconceived notions that this might be unstable or difficult to learn, or hurt your knee,” Hunter says. “We have to dispel these myths because none of these things are happening.”

Not only does the iWALKFree provide excellent physical benefits, but also mental ones as well, he adds, with the obvious one of simply being able to perform all necessary daily tasks without the inhibitions created by crutches or scooters.

Of course, the medical benefits are also tremendous. The company’s considerable clinical research has shown using iWALKFree allows for better muscle activation, which translates to less muscle atrophy as well as improved blood flow, which is critical in healing. “We can’t emphasize this enough,” Hunter says.

In simple terms, your heart sends the blood out, and muscle activity sends the blood back. Without activity, the blood will pool, particularly in the lower leg which is the furthest from the heart.

“When you’re using an iWALK, not only are the muscles of your upper leg activated because you’re walking on it but because it’s so much like regular walking the lower leg muscles are activating in the same sequence as they would for normal human walking,” says Hunter.

Better blood flow not only reduces the risk of DVT—deep vein thrombosis—but also pushes healing nutrients to the affected area, resulting in faster healing, higher compliance, less fatigue, and fewer re-injuries. Hunter adds that, “when the medical community learns of this, it’s going to make the iWALK crutch the go-to device over crutches or knee scooters.”

Of course, this depends on patients using the device properly and for the medically suggested length of time, another reason why iWALKFree’s ease of use is so beneficial—users are less likely to take shortcuts.

“Most people on crutches will cheat, and they risk the potential of reiinjury, which is not uncommon,” Hunter says. “The reason they cheat is that they can’t even get a cup of coffee and carry it across the room, so they hop on one foot and wind up putting weight on their leg and reinjuring themselves. Compliance is much higher with the iWALK, which is a big thing.”

Despite these advantages, one of the company’s challenges is raising awareness of the device’s existence and what it does. Educating the general public and the medical community and making iWALKFree more available and visible is a long haul, but one the company is willing to tackle through doctors, word-of-mouth, personal research, and digital marketing.

“If you go on Google and type in crutches or something related to your injury, it’s very likely that one of our ads or a link to our website will appear, so you can find out if the iWALK is right for you,” says Hunter.

The company also does a lot of medical outreach, corresponding directly with physicians and physical therapists, but the competition—large, well-established big pharma companies in all fields also vying for doctors’ time and attention—is formidable.

“But more and more doctors are learning about the benefits of the iWALK and recommending it to their patients,” says Hunter. “Once you’ve seen somebody on iWALK, you can’t unsee it. It’s really memorable.”

Customers are often the best, least biased salespeople: Not only are they seen using the device in public, they share their experiences with those using crutches, and while 100 million crutches are sold each year for below-the-knee injuries, says Hunter, only one company creates the iWALKFree.

“Market potential is 50 million units per year because we were first to market, and we were able to identify design elements essential for proper functioning of the device,” he says.

Patented worldwide, iWALKFree is poised to challenge traditional crutches that are the status quo and at the same time are universally hated.

“It’s just bizarre that this is the only one of its kind and that it’s not more popular than it is,” Hunter says. “It will be, but it’s a matter of time. I’m surprised it’s taking as long as it is, but two things come to mind. They say if you build a better mousetrap, the world will beat a path to your door. It turns out that’s no longer true. The other one was Rome wasn’t built in a day. That one is true.”

All this means the marketing component is key. The product is fantastic, it’s scalable, and the manufacturing is in place, Hunter says. “But part of the challenge of marketing the iWALKFree crutch is that we’re not really relevant unless you need crutches—then we become very relevant.”

The product may be simple in concept, but it boasts numerous selling points.

The first-generation product was large and heavy, making it costly to warehouse and ship—and of course, relatively heavy to wear. It lacked many of the necessary adjustments to make it work efficiently in a one-size-fits-all scenario. But it proved the concept and launched the company.

Competing with crutches at $50 a pair meant pricing was extremely important. So while it’s never easy to manufacture something, the manufacturing cost is an even bigger challenge, says Hunter. The company realized early on that when the product started kicking off all by itself at some point, without proper planning, scalability would become a problem.

“From the get-go, it was manufactured with all of those things in mind,” Hunter says. “It had to work and have all the functionality so that customers could get what they needed, but it had to be economical. It had to be compact where possible, and scalable, because if our sales doubled, or tripled, or quadrupled, which is entirely possible at some point, then you have a manufacturing problem.”

To combat some of these issues, iWALKFree uses commonly available materials, such as polypropylene and nylon six in the thermoplastics and 6061 and 6063 alloy aluminum extrusions, which are available from multiple manufacturers anywhere in the world. The foam and fabrics used are also common materials, combining to create an economical price point of $159. And it now weighs a mere 4.8 lbs. (2.1 kg), which is on par with a standard pair of crutches.

The device is also compact: It fits into a shoe-sized box, requires no inner protective packaging and snaps together without tools.

“It was pretty obvious from the get-go that the success of the device was going to be largely dependent on how we manufactured it,” Hunter says.

Now the challenge lies in gaining recognition around the world as well as working on health and workers compensation insurance. While the iWALKFree is reimbursed by many private insurance companies, the goal is to make it an across-the-board, consistent policy. But, Hunter says with all the red tape involved, both innovation and patients end up suffering.

“There’s absolutely no reason why it won’t become the standard of care. With every unit that we sell, we’re helping somebody in a significant way at a time when they really need it. And that’s the part for me that’s just so enticing about this entire thing.”

The company receives many unsolicited testimonials from customers grateful to have their lives back, whether a parent looking after a child or someone in danger of losing their job due to an accident. The team also has many high-profile celebrities who have used and endorsed the iWALK. Eleven world champion athletes and Olympic gold medalists have also used and praised the iWALK—and iWALK has never paid for an endorsement.

“When you’re on crutches you get your whole life taken away from you, and then all of a sudden, unexpectedly you get it back. It’s a really big deal,” says Hunter. “It’s so cliché, but we hear it all the time from our customers—and they use the words game changer.”

The company understood early on that changing a paradigm of thought would be one of its biggest challenges, with crutches having been done much the same way for thousands of years and scooters having a 20-year head start, Hunter says, but his confidence in the product is unwavering.

“I hope you don’t ever need an iWALKFree, but sometime, maybe, you’ll be glad that we exist,” he adds. “I’ve researched it thoroughly, and I can’t think of any reason why the iWALK won’t become the standard of care. There are just too many benefits. It’s for sure the future of mobility.”

The post Walk This Way – Taking Injuries and Accidents in Stride<p class="company">iWALKFree</p> appeared first on Business In Focus Magazine.