The need for quality healthcare constantly grows as the global population and life expectancy increases. At the same time, hospitals struggle with budget deficits, personnel shortages, and stressful working environments. Tada Group’s innovation ReLink aims to significantly contribute to a sustainable, efficient, affordable, and safe healthcare system of tomorrow. Intravenous (IV) therapy is the most common invasive treatment in the world received by 90% of in-hospital patients. However, around 10% of all IV lines are accidentally ripped from the patient’s vein during treatment, i.e. IV dislodgement. This results in consequences such as loss of medication, interrupted therapy, patient injury, and increased personnel workload. Our patented technology, ReLink targets the safety issues with accidental dislodgement of IV lines. Its breakaway connector approach significantly reduces the risk for dislodgement, and its unique design minimises the adverse consequences.
ReLink keeps patients and nurses safe, supports accurate drug delivery, saves nursing time and makes IV therapy safer, more accurate and efficient. This proposition plays out in multiple ways for our stakeholders.
• Patients - Significantly enhanced safety, reduction of injuries, improved accuracy of treatment.
• Nurses – Improved workplace safety through less spill of potentially hazardous drugs and contaminated blood. Increased efficiency (90% reduction in number of hours to manage IV disconnections - estimated to be over 90,000 hours annually in Europe and US).
• Hospitals - Cost reduction, improved nursing efficiency, reduced risk of legal liabilities towards emerging regulations for workplaces hazards, reduced plastic waste.
• Payers - Reduction in treatment costs.
• OEM partners – Improve competitiveness of the IV infusion product portfolio, opportunity to integrate ReLink in their portfolio and offer a differentiated solution in a mature market. Improve price realisation. Offer efficiency, a better infection protection solution and reduced bedside time for care to your healthcare partners (a need highlighted by the COVID-19 pandemic).
The main objective of the project is to evolve the Tada Group´s breakaway connector ReLink from its current prototype phase to a market ready product. The project is divided into five work packages, sub-objectives for these are 1) prototyping and production of ReLink devices for testing and demonstrations, 2) ISO 13485 certification and regulatory approval, 3) extended patent protection, 4) dissemination through conference contributions, trade fairs, press releases, white papers etc., 5) project management.
