ENvizion is a “Waze for feeding tubes,” and here’s why that’s important in a post-COVID world

The COVID-19 pandemic continues to rage on, but quite often, we don’t think of the consequences for those people that contract it. Often we hear of friends who have a few weeks of symptoms while at home, but for many, the situation is life-threatening.

In severe cases, coronavirus has people fighting for their lives. Alone, sedated, and without friends and family by their side. Patients connected to a life support machine will need to receive nutrition through an enteral feeding tube. And here’s the problem.

According to multiple studies, placing feeding tubes blindly leads to several complications, including the patient’s death. In one review of 9,931 insertions, 187 ended up in the tracheobronchial tree (which transports air into the lungs) instead of the stomach, with at least five of these misplacements caused patient death.

Intending to change this situation forever, ENvizion has created what can be described, since the company was founded in Israel, as the “Waze of feeding tubes.”

To get an idea of how it works, Doron Besser, CEO at ENvizion, demonstrated the ENvue solution to me (via Zoom, of course). Of course, the demonstration was not on a real patient, but using a highly sophisticated model that allowed me to see the inner workings of the body.

Before Besser started inserting tubes into our plastic and rubber test dummy, we discussed the problem’s size.