Hello Jörgen Höjdmo, Development Manager at Pharmacolog. Tell us about your background and what you do at Pharmacolog
Hello! I’ve been involved in product development in different industries for a few decades. I got my start in medtech at Helax in the mid-nineties doing work on oncology software. The following years, during the Dotcom bubble, I worked as a software development consultant in several start-ups spanning from software for interactive TV, records management systems for the public sector to chemical analysis software for the pharmaceutical industry. In 2005 I became the CEO of a company named Digital Diary, which me and my partners later sold to a public company. After Digital Diary I spent the following decade building an organization-wide document management system for the Swedish Armed Forces. Around the same time, I started creating the backbone of what would later become the DrugLog technology. My primary task here at Pharmacolog is to set and maintain the architecture of the product portfolio and to lead our development team.
ReVal™ is a new application that provides an assisted workflow when preparing pharmaceuticals. What’s unique about it?
Swedish hospitals, and particularly Karolinska University Hospital, have the ambition to standardize the reconstitution of medication in paediatric care. The objective is to ensure that each dose is prepared according to best practise at every hospital. These best practises are as of now confined to paediatrics and are collectively referred to as ePed. We helped Karolinska facilitate the process of verifying that reconstitutions are correctly prepared. This was the premise of the ReVal project. What’s unique about it is the validation of the complete process: proper preparation, complete traceability and a final validation of the end result. The validation step can detect errors made both in the process and outside it. One example is when a pharmaceutical is not what is printed on the label. ReVal can detect these oversights regardless of the reason for them.
In your view, what’s the most exciting new trend or technology with potential to enhance the efficiacy and safety of medication?
Two dominant trends are evident. The first of these is the increased focus on improved drug handling within healthcare. This is important in order to ensure that the patient gets the right medication with the right concentration. Second, how can the administration of prescription drugs be optimized for maximum curative effect? Our core technology, today represented by DrugLog, can play a role in both trends.
