Cloud-based Mana helps pharmacists offer point-of-care testing

Sousan Bagherpoor was a medical lab scientist working in point of care when she took an Artificial Intelligence in Health Care course that changed how she saw everything. She started noticing how AI could help her work. “A lot of the processing I was doing manually, I started thinking about how AI could improve the process at every step,” she says. At the same time, she was aware of how point-of-care testing was coming out of hospitals and into the community in Ontario and worried that that transition had no built-in oversight. She was inspired to start her own company, Virtual POCT, to fill that void.Read: AI scribes cut time physicians spent on paperwork down by 70%-to-90%, Ontario survey findsBagherpoor started taking classes on how pharmacies were going to implement point of care, and talking to pharmacists themselves. Pharmacists in Ontario are authorized to do four point-of-care tests right now, and the province is investigating adding more tests, such as strep throat tests, in the future. But many told Bagherpoor they found the idea of offering it daunting. “I found there is no resource, people don’t know what to do,” she says, and pharmacists were hesitating to introduce point-of-care testing because they weren’t sure how to implement it, and were worried about causing harm to patients. Read: Tackling polypharmacy in psychiatryShe founded Virtual POCT in 2020 as a one-to-one consulting service. After a few years, in 2024, she switched to working on a digital version that would reach more people and be more affordable. Bagherpoor is now creating Mana, a cloud-based program that helps pharmacies implement point-of-care testing with the help of AI. It’s based on Clinical and Laboratory Standards Institute guidelines to comply with ISO standards, and covers everything from training to documentation. “We want to follow the system that has already been proven and make that system easy, understandable and accessible to people,” she says. “It allows people to follow a proven system that they know can give the right results.” AI will be added to specific processes where it makes sense. Generative AI, for example, might help with writing, and a chatbot could answer users’ questions.The program is still in development, but she's hoping to release a minimum viable product by the end of 2024. It will start with an Ontario launch and then, hopefully, spread across the country and even internationally. Bagherpoor is hopeful more pharmacists will offer point-of-care testing if they can trust that it will be easy to integrate into their existing operations and will offer patients the right results. “It’s good for pharmacies because it can generate revenue, and it’s good for patients because [they can access a pharmacy] and get the right result quickly,” she says. “Our goal is to make it so simple that people don’t hesitate to add it.” Read: B.C. government is testing out AI tools for rapid disease diagnosis

Cloud-based Mana helps pharmacists offer point-of-care testing

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