Tuesday 31 March 2015

Embrace: A Worldwide Infant Warmer

The Origins of Embrace

While all innovations currently featured on Globalhealth.care are 'from' India, their geographical origins are in reality hard to place. Sometimes they arise in the mind of an MIT graduate student in Cambridge, and other times in the mind of a local entrepreneur in Chennai. But always the innovator is designing a value medtech product for low-resource settings, and India becomes the primary or initial market for the finished product.

The story of the Embrace Warmer illustrates the international nature of innovation very well. Four entrepreneurs at Stanford from various academic and cultural backgrounds met in the Design School's 2007 "Design For Extreme Affordability" class, and began to look for unmet clinical needs in emerging markets. They were Jane ChenRahul PanickerNaganand Murty, and Linus Liang.

The team's first trips to South Asia keyed them into the magnitude of the high premature infant death rate problem. Worldwide, there are fifteen million premature babies born each year. About 3 million of these currently die, mostly in the developing world, and usually within their first month of life. One of the main health challenges for these infants arises from their lack of body fat. Weighing only between 500 and 2,500 grams, it is difficult for them to regulate their own body temperatures. The mother's skin-to-skin embrace is a highly effective form of warming, but it is not feasible for mothers to embrace their infants 24-7. And so families in low-resource settings that lack the infrastructure or cash for expensive incubators and electricity-hungry radiant warmers, turn to devices that under-serve their needs: Thermal boxes, hot coals, hot water bottles, tubs, or light bulbs. These homespun solutions are dangerous and inconsistent.

The team began to envision a safe product to keep premature babies warm that would cost only 1% of a traditional incubator's price tag of $20,000. In fact, incubators are the clinical gold standard for premature infant warming, but the team actually observed one being used as a filing cabinet in one Indian rural clinic! Jane Chen explains:
"What we needed was not just a lower-cost version of what exists today. We needed something that could function without a constant supply of electricity; something that was easy enough for a mother, a midwife, a healthcare worker to use. Something that would stay at a hospital but also a village clinic." 
In other words, the 'golden standard' technology is sometimes too expensive, too demanding, or otherwise too inaccessible to effectively address widely held public health challenges around the world, such as premature infant warming.


The Embrace Warmer

Embrace Warmer
After months of iterative prototyping, and incorporating as a non-profit, the Embrace team released the first version of Embrace Warmer at an initial retail price of between $200-$300, depending on distribution logistics. Each warmer is reusable, easily cleaned, and continuously warms an infant at the optimal temperature of 98 degrees F by the means of an innovative phase-changing sheet of wax that is quickly and precisely heated by a jolt of electricity via the warming device shown at right. Once melted, the wax holds its temperature for 8 hours. To date, the Embrace Warmer has served over 150,000 infants in over 11 countries.

To accelerate access to the product, Embrace has split their mission into two entities. The non-profit Embrace owns the IP, donates product to the world's neediest populations, as well as provides training and education in maternal care. The for-profit social enterprise Embrace Innovations licenses the IP, pays for continued R&D and manufacturing, and sells product to paying entities like governments and hospital systems. In this way, Embrace hopes to expand quickly while still remaining financially viable.


Could Embrace Warmers Disrupt NICUs / Incubators in the U.S.?

Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) are expensive to build and maintain, so hospitals typically place infants weighing below 2,500 grams in the NICU incubators not only to be on the safe side, but also to cover their expenses and generate additional profits. The potential overuse of NICUs in the U.S. is further highlighted by a study from Intermountain Healthcare's insurance arm, Select Health, which found that electively induced infants were 2-3x more likely to be placed in intensive care on average. This finding helped to curb their OBGYNs' widespread acceptance of casual elective induction, and by modifying their evidence-based guidelines for child birth, Intermountain has reduced this expensive practice. But this story is not typical among U.S. hospitals: Intermountain is one of the few truly integrated providers in the U.S., which gives them the means, will, and power to enforce obviously beneficial efficiency gains.

The gains might go further. For instance, the Embrace Warmer is indicated for use with infants weighing between 1,500 and 2,500 grams. While premature babies' weight can be as little as 500 grams, 95% of them weigh more than 1,500 grams, and do not necessarily require the 'golden standard' treatment available in hospital NICUs to survive and be healthy. What kind of savings could the U.S. realize if premature infants weighing between 1,500 and 2,500 grams without additional complications were wrapped in an Embrace Warmer and delivered to their mother's bedside rather than placed in a NICU incubator? One recent Business Insider article entitled Prematurity Rates Are Too High - And Children's Hospitals Are Cashing In calculates average hospital stay costs for premature babies at $275,000 higher than for the average non-premature infant. There are 500,000 premature babies born per year in the U.S., apropos a proportion that has grown markedly in recent decades. Assuming that just 50% of these babies could be given a $300 Embrace Warmer instead of spending time in the NICU, the U.S. would save nearly $7 billion per year.

The Embrace Warmer is manufactured to the highest standards of quality, and the product has received the CE Mark, indicating the possibility of FDA clearance in the U.S.. In fact, Embrace Innovations is already planning a U.S. launch of a direct-to-consumer product called the Little Lotus Baby. The product is a high-tech blanket containing sensors enabling temperature control and likely some degree remote monitoring. The company has not yet released details, but the launch is scheduled for April 15th, 2015.

Jane Chen has stated that revenues from this product ". . . will go towards subsidizing our work in developing countries," which is an echo of the successful Tom's Shoes strategy. I hope it works, but an even more successful way to make money may be in disrupting the $15 billion U.S. NICU market with a souped-up version of the Embrace Warmer.


Question For Discussion:
  • Could a 'smart' version of the Embrace Warmer disrupt traditional incubators in the U.S.? 

21 comments:

  1. One of the primary health difficulties for these babies arises from their own lack of excess fat. Weighing just between five hundred and two, 500 grms, it is hard for them to control their own entire body temperatures. The actual mother's skin-to-skin embrace is really a highly effective type of warming, however it is not simple for mothers in order to embrace their own infants 24-7.

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  19. Although all of the innovations that are currently displayed on Globalhealth.care are 'from' India, it is difficult to pinpoint exactly where they originated. They occur occasionally in the thoughts of a local entrepreneur in Chennai and occasionally in the thoughts of a graduate student at MIT in Cambridge. However, the inventor is always creating a low-cost medical technology solution for environments with limited resources, and India ends up being the product's main or launch market. If you're intrigued by the intersection of innovation, healthcare, and global markets, you might consider exploring relevant courses or resources. Experts in the field can provide valuable insights, and you can even opt to pay for online class help to delve deeper into the complexities of these topics.

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