Walloon medtech company Dim3 recently received the prestigious ‘AboutPharma’ Award in Italy for its Nutrow platform. This tool makes it possible to manage and supervise the artificial feeding of a patient in real time, whether in a hospital, a nursing home or your own house. This bespoke supervision allows patients who are receiving nutrition from a tube to leave the hospital more quickly. This solution was even more useful during the current pandemic, when one of the challenges was preventing hospitals from becoming overcrowded.
This award was bestowed by the Italian Association for the Pharmaceutical Industry, in the Professional Medical Support category, a category that had received nearly 50 submissions.
Dim3 specialises in developing, manufacturing and marketing of expert clinical platforms that help with making medical decisions. In 2019, this Liège-based company entered into an important partnership with Vivisol, the European leader in clinical nutrition, for the home monitoring of more than one thousand patients who require artificial enteral feeding (a method of artificial feeding in which the nutrients are delivered directly to the stomach, thus avoiding the standard nutritional and digestive tracts).
‘The benefits linked to the use of Nutrow are varied and significant’ says Jean-Claude Havaux, the CEO of DIM3. ‘And the period that we have just gone through, with the successive lockdowns, showed the usefulness, or indeed necessity, of being able to rely on a solution like Nutrow. This prestigious prize that we have just received, alongside our partner Vivisol, shows the relevant and quality of our product, as well as the merits of our approach ! Our unique Nutrow solution is set to play a crucial role in the future, in supervising patients who are being fed artificially, not just in Belgium and Italy, but throughout Europe as well.’
For example, the number of Italian patients needing to be artificially fed by enteral or parenteral means was estimated by the Italian Society for Enteral and Parenteral Nutrition (SINPE) in 2017 as more than twenty thousand each day.
According to a study conducted in 2004, permanent and adapted nutritional supervision significantly reduces the risk of complications for the patient and, for patients admitted to intensive care, slashes the risk of mortality by nearly 60%. The length of time spent in hospital is also reduced compared to hospitalisation that does not involve Nutrow supervision, as well as readmissions for the same patient.
On the other hand, since this connected platform makes it possible to centralise almost all of the data about the patient’s nutritional status in real time, it helps to guide the medical team towards the best nutritional plan for them, which also represents time saved for the care team, as manual data entry is simplified.