Sustainable Protection of Healthcare Workers Around the World Through MEDU
The Enormous Problem of Medical Waste + Short Supply Issues
Waste is a complex and expensive challenge for health care organizations, no matter their size. Hospitals in the US produce more than 5 million tons of waste each year, which equates to over 29 pounds of waste per bed per hospital per day. This means on average, nine pounds of medical waste is generated per doctor every single day. This is nearly double the amount of per-capita waste generated annually for the average person. Every hospital is challenged by this problem and there are limited recycling and management options available to solve it.
As defined by the EPA, medical waste is healthcare waste that may be contaminated by blood, body fluids or other potentially infectious materials and is often referred to as regulated medical waste. But this is just regulated medical waste. In 2020, The Johns Hopkins Health System alone spent a total of $1.27B ($3.5M per day and $11.3M per month) on supplies, which they define as medical supplies, drugs, linen, and parts inventory, the vast majority of which end up as waste. US hospitals spent a combined total of $40B on medical and surgical supplies in 2020 — with an average of $13M per hospital.
Hospitals are woefully behind many other industries in terms of efforts to minimize not just waste, but excess costs through the use of innovative products and programs designed to make better and more efficient use of medical supplies.
Exacerbating this problem has been the short-supply of medical equipment in general. Medical PPE, or personal protective equipment, which consists of masks, gloves and gowns, became a very hot topic during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic mostly because of the extreme lack of supply when medical staff needed it most. Images like the one below flooded the news, where nurses and doctors worked 12–24 hours shifts in homemade gowns or masks made of trash bags, fish bowls, and even underwear.
Lisa Ishii, a head and neck surgeon, and senior vice president of operations for Johns Hopkins Health System wrote an article for Vox in 2020 saying that surgical gowns used to cost Johns Hopkins only $0.40 pre-pandemic, but that costs skyrocketed up to $9.00. Even as the pandemic has subsided, these costs have not come down.
A Simple Yet Revolutionary Product to the Rescue
Medical gowns are examples of personal protective equipment used in healthcare settings, and are part of an overall infection-control strategy. Accordingly, their use inside of hospitals is not only essential, it is mandatory. Gowns are used to protect the wearer from the spread of infection or illness if the wearer comes in contact with potentially infectious liquid and solid material. They may also be used to help prevent the gown wearer from transferring microorganisms that could harm vulnerable patients, such as those with weakened immune systems.
In 2004, the FDA recognized the consensus standard American National Standards Institute/Association of the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation (ANSI/AAMI) PB70:2003), “Liquid barrier performance and classification of protective apparel and drapes intended for use in health care facilities.” New terminology in the standard describes the barrier protection levels of gowns and other protective apparel intended for use in health care facilities and specifies test methods and performance results necessary to verify and validate that the gown provides the newly defined levels of protection.
In the United States surgical and surgical isolation gowns are regulated by the FDA as a Class II medical device that requires a 510(k) premarket notification, a premarket submission made to FDA to demonstrate that the device to be marketed is as safe and effective.
Nearly all surgical gowns sold today are single-use disposable gowns leading to the supply and waste issues outlined above.
Today we are very excited to announce that MaC Venture Capital has led the $4M series seed round into MEDU, a Mexico City and New York based company that has developed and is producing reusable, virus-resistant medical clothing, starting with surgical gowns. We are joined by Halcyon Fund and other strategic angel investors in this journey to support MEDU’s vision of protecting all health professionals in an environmentally sustainable way.
MEDU’s gown is an FDA class II surgical gown that is virus and bacteria resistant. Additionally, it has been designed so that the gown is reusable up to 50 washes which enables a single gown to be worn up to 450 different times. The actual gowns have only two layers: an inner layer of cotton and an outer layer of polyurethane. The fabric of the figure absorbs liquids and then releases them in the wash. The model MEDU uses is a technical fabric with a membrane which acts as a filter, encapsulating bacteria or viruses when they come into contact with it. This process is carried out so that there is no risk of contamination between uses. The encapsulation of the bacteria or virus allows the release of all these at the time of washing, allowing the gown to be completely sterile after washing.
In addition to the reusable gowns, MEDU has also developed a desktop and mobile application that allows hospitals, doctors and nurses to track the useful life of medical supplies and equipment with integrated QR codes and NFC technology (Near Field Communication).
Shockingly, while hospitals have detailed purchase and inventory tracking systems, they really don’t have systems that allow them to track how their doctors and nurses use disposable medical supplies. They know what supply they have, and how much they’ve spent on it, but little idea on how those supplies are being used. There is no tracking of supplies used by patients, doctors or nurses, nor times of day or days of week when the most supplies are used or disposed of. There may be one doctor that goes through 1,000 pairs of gloves per week and a hospital wouldn’t know that — they would just know they’re spending a lot per month on gloves. Some doctors may be judicious with their supply use while others may be wasteful, but at the vast majority of hospitals, none of this information is tracked or recorded.
MEDU’s desktop and mobile application allows users to track the usage of a variety of medical supplies, starting with MEDU’s gowns. Initially, gowns were embedded with QR codes that users could scan with a mobile phone upon wearing or washing so that the software could track usage. MEDU has since upgraded the QR technology to an embedded NFC tag or chip inside the gowns and other medical supplies that can be wirelessly read over short distances by a mobile phone with the app installed. The user chooses if they are wearing or laundering the item and then the system tracks all the data around specific users, initial usage, re-usage, laundering and more. The desktop dashboard provides analysis and trend data for specific items, personnel, times and dates of heaviest use, waste, cost savings and more.
MEDU gowns and software are currently being used in five hospitals in Mexico, including Mexico’s biggest hospital Hospital General de México, and they are being trialed in five major hospitals in the US with a larger global rollout planned for 2023.
A Founder With a Personal Mission
The medical gown industry is dominated by companies who have an average age of 83 years: 3M, DuPont, Ansell, Avon Rubber, Draeger, Honeywell and Lindström Group (which was started way back in 1847) to name a few. Going up against these institutional behemoths may seem like a futile act, but as Steve Jobs once said, “the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world are the ones who do.”
MEDU Founder and CEO Tamara (“Tamy”) Chayo is the person crazy enough to succeed in this bold vision to make the medical industry greener and more sustainable with products that can not only save hospitals millions of dollars, but also provide better protection to their front-line workers, nurses, doctors and surgeons.
Tamy was drawn to chemistry at a very young age because as she says “it’s a field where you create something from nothing or where one thing can transform into another.” She decided early on that she wanted to change the world through chemistry. This is what led her to seek out her scientist mentor, who she went to work for in his lab at age 12. Three years later this mentor died unexpectedly while Tamy was just in high school. She made it her mission to continue his work and did so until entering Mexico’s most innovative private universities, Universidad La Salle México in 2018. Two years into her undergraduate in March of 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic hit, and with several family members who were front-line doctors and nurses putting themselves at risk daily with limited PPE supplies, Tamy started spending nights and weekends back at her high school lab refining the work she had started at age 12 into a solution for her family. Fortunately, the other half of Tamy’s family worked in the textile industry and she combined her medical studies around virus-resistant membranes with fabric insights from her family to create her first gown prototype.
At first she gave these gowns to her front-line family members, but quickly their colleagues started asking for them as well. With demand surging, Tamy held a successful
$400K crowdfunding campaign later in 2020 to scale up production of her gowns and incorporate her business. She won a few startup competitions and was voted as one of the top 10 Mexican entrepreneurs by The Association of Entrepreneurs of Mexico (ASEM).
By mid-2021 Tamy had commercial contracts with several Mexican hospitals, including Angeles Hospital and Hospital General de México, the largest hospital in Mexico. In January 2022, at the age of 22, Tamy was named as one of the 23 new members to the prestigious Thiel Fellowship Program. A month later, Tamy accepted an invitation to join the Washington DC based Halcyon Accelerator that focuses on companies with impact-driven businesses.
An Important Company For This Moment
Hospital gowns are an inelastic product that will be needed in good times and bad. The market is truly global and is enormous. The 90% cost savings she can offer to medical institutions who are seemingly always trying to find ways to do more with less will be a welcome panacea. MEDU has great traction with many leading hospitals and Tamy has a killer network that will help her leverage her first-mover advantage to win large market share around the world.
MEDU’s success will be not just economic, but also environmental: globally, on average doctors dispose of nine pounds of medical waste every single day. They each throw away nearly 1,500 disposable gowns each year. Those alone make up 36.5 tons of waste annually.
The cost of waste in the U.S. healthcare system ranges from $760B to $935B annually, according to a JAMA review of 54 peer-reviewed studies. Like the fashion, automotive and energy industries, healthcare needs to embrace sustainability and heavily lean into reusability of disposable medical supplies where it is safe and makes sense to do so.
MEDU presents an incredible opportunity for the industry to do just that.
Michael Palank led the MEDU seed round for MaC Venture Capital.
About MaC Venture Capital
MaC Venture Capital is a seed-stage venture capital firm based in Los Angeles and Silicon Valley that invests in technology startups leveraging shifts in cultural trends and behaviors. The general partners represent diverse backgrounds in technology, business, politics, entertainment, and finance, allowing them to accelerate entrepreneurs on the verge of their breakthrough moment. The firm provides hands-on support crucial for building and scaling category-leading companies, including operations strategy, brand building, recruiting, sales development, and mission-critical introductions. MaC Venture Capital is the result of a merger between Cross Culture Ventures, co-founded by Marlon Nichols, and M Ventures, co-founded by Adrian Fenty, Michael Palank, and Charles D. King. Find MaC Venture Capital online at https://macventurecapital.com and @MaCVentureCap.
