Phil Davies founded Hospital Innovations after years of working for companies like Johnson & Johnson and Plus Orthopedics. The business focused on human transplant tissue, although the company diversified by developing lines of medical instruments and implants.
Hospital Innovations supplies allograft tissue for a number of operations, including knee replacements. An allograft is tissue from a human donor that is then transplanted into another human body.
When knees are replaced or reconstructed, for example, the body has no ligament tissue to stabilize the joint. In the past, surgeons would graft tissue from the back of a patient's leg to reconstruct the ligaments.
Now, thanks to Hospital Innovations, physicians have wider access to allograft tissue. The secret to the company's success was a patent developed by an American partner called RTI.
RTI developed a method for sterilizing allograft tissue using chemicals instead of irradiating the tissue. Radiation had been shown to have the potential to damage tissue before it was transplanted. The success of the RTI solution led to the creation of allografts for patellas, Achilles tendons and even hamstrings.
Building on this success, Hospital Innovations developed an innovative way to transport allografts. Before the Hospital Innovations solutions, hospitals would throw tissue away if it wasn't used on the day it arrived.
Hospitals were wasting money by ordering two tissue allografts for every transplant. If one sample was the wrong size, it would be thrown away.
"Normally, if human tissues aren’t used on the day they’re delivered, they get incinerated," Davies explained to Wales Online. "That’s a tissue that’s been donated by somebody’s son, daughter, father, mother. It’s a precious gift."
Now, Hospital Innovations packages tissue in a sealed box with a temperature gauge inside. Hospitals can send back the boxes, which can last for five days, as long as the seal isn't broken. Then, the tissue is set aside until the next time a surgeon from the same hospital requests it, when it is then shipped out for free.
Davies estimates that he has saved the British National Health Service over 1 million pounds thanks to the procedure.
"There are a lot of products now that don’t need to be premium," Davies explained. "If I need to get to my office I don’t need a Bentley, I just need transport. The health service in the U.K. needs to wake up to that."
Edited by
Braden Becker
