ENvizion®, the FDA 510(k) cleared leader in enteral feeding placement navigation technology, announces its agreement with one of the largest private hospital networks in the U.S., with more than one hundred hospitals, to provide ENvizion’s feeding tube placement navigation devices nationwide. The company’s endeavor is backed by $18 million in investment. Key investors include private medtech backers, family offices, and the Technion Venture Capital fund.
Each year, nearly eight million feeding tubes are placed blindly inside patients in the United States for a variety of medical cases, but many of them are not placed with any sort of technical guidance. Blind placement can lead to a mistaken placement of the tube in the lungs, resulting potentially in pneumothorax, pneumonia, or even death. With a constant flow of hospitalized patients who require enteral feeding－especially during the COVID-19 pandemic for patients who require ventilators－the time-consuming nature of tube placement and immediate need for patient nutrition, and the limited resources hospitals have, Envizion is working together with various hospitals to minimize error and maximize enteral procedure efficiency.
The hospital network now has the opportunity to add ENvizion’s navigation device, “ENVue®.” The device, which can cut the usual placement procedure time in half, harnesses the power of electromagnetic mapping to guide medical-support staff in placing the tube from the nasal cavity down the esophagus, and all the way through to the small intestine, the anatomical location where nutrients are absorbed by the body. To avoid placing the tube into the lungs and ensure placement is executed correctly, the ENVue device provides guidance through a number of technical mechanisms:
- Patient body mapping: ENVue creates an accurate map of the patient’s body by generating an electromagnetic field that connects the device’s computer and the tube tip. The tube tip’s location inside the patient remains highly accurate despite any movement by the patients during placement.
- Multi-faceted vision: The ENVue device’s screen shows an axial, frontal, and lateral view of the patient’s body, so as to indicate the depth and height as the tube moves through the digestive system. This ensures that from three different angles, the support-staff member can ensure the tube is not in the trachea, and always in the digestive tract.
- Directional guidance: The device screen guides the staff member placing the tube with an arrow that signals in white when the tube is fed in the correct tract, and red when placed in a direction that may potentially be harmful to the patient.
Combined, the three different mechanisms provide a significant layer of confidence to medical-support staff in patient care, minimizing the potentially fatal results of a blind placement and accelerating the procedure time itself for better staff resource allocation.
“We are very excited about the opportunity our work with these hospitals can bring to the U.S.,” says ENvizion President & CEO Doron Besser, MD. “The potential for our navigation technology to both greatly reduce detrimental placements and cut down the time required to place tubes will help clinicians perform the task much more confidently and efficiently.”
About ENvizion
Founded 2013, ENvizion Medical is a privately held medical device company located in Tel Aviv, with U.S. distribution headquarters in Minneapolis. ENvizion is an innovation leader in the field of enteral feeding, focused on improving patient outcomes across the continuum of care, encompassing the development of advanced, personalized navigation technology for feeding tubes, responding to the challenges of the ever changing healthcare environment, while continuously focusing on the customer.
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