SBIA PARTNER PROFILE HEALTHBEACON
HealthBeacon’s Smart Sharps Bins Enter the Circular Economy An innovative technology, helping patients remember to take their medication, is now greener, with an eight-step sterilisation process allowing them to be reused
E
ven when you do something every day, sometimes it’s easy to forget whether you’ve done it or not—so for patients who need to inject medication, it can be an extra source of stress to keep track of their medications. HealthBeacon is an innovative company with a practical solution that helps patients take their medications on schedule, using a connected medicine platform. By using digitally-enabled sharps bins to dispose of used injection needles, the patient’s injection history is tracked and reminders are issued to keep the patient on schedule. With the intervention of HealthBeacon’s Injection Care Management System (ICMS) Technology, patients’ persistence and adherence increased by 25-30% within 12 months of initiating therapy. The technology has so far been adopted across 13 countries and over 500,000 injections tracked since launch in 2014. SMART SHARPS As part of the HealthBeacon ICMS offering, patients receive a preprogrammed Smart Sharps Bin System with a patient’s injection schedule. When the patient administers their medication, they drop the syringe or device into the HealthBeacon chamber which takes an image of the sharps object and a time stamp. This acts as a close proxy to the administration
Marion Briggs, Sustainability Manager, HealthBeacon
event and can be utilised by health care professionals to discuss a patient’s compliance with their medication. However, this creates a waste stream of used injections and the bins that hold them. HealthBeacon was already in the practice of refurbishing and redeploying their injection adherence device, but wanted to tackle the bins and waste as well. CIRCULAR ECONOMY Following an Extended Producer Responsibility model meant finding a way to make any parts of the waste stream sustainable or circular. The bins were a natural fit for circularity, and HealthBeacon set about building a lab
to sterilise and reuse their sharps bins rather than sending them to landfill or incineration. “While reusable sharps bins have been in use in hospitals for over 30 years, our research indicated that home injection users had no option but to dispose of their bins in a non-sustainable way through landfill or incineration,” notes Marion Briggs, Sustainability Manager at HealthBeacon. Now, following the introduction of the HealthBeacon Green Labs process, patients receive a sharps bin that can be reused multiple times; used bins, once emptied, undergo an eight-step process which sterilises them and allows them to be put back into use. HealthBeacon is currently in the process of getting their bins ISO 23907-2 approved for reusing them 25 times, and getting EPA approval for their Green Labs process. Working with the Clean Technology Centre in Cork, HealthBeacon forecasts that 271 tonnes of carbon (the equivalent of 404 international flights) will be saved for every 10,000 reusable bins.
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