By Kim Boram
At pharmacies and medical clinics, it is essential that the right number of pills be dispensed to patients, and counting them is a tedious task that druggists have to complete daily or monthly for inventory management. If the dosage is incorrect, the consequences can be dire. South Korean pharm tech startup Medility Inc. founder and CEO Benny Park recognized this issue and developed the pill counting app Pilleye in 2020 to help alleviate the burden for healthcare professionals.
“It is a repetitive, non-value-added back-office task, which is tedious and time consuming, for a pharmacist,” Park said in an interview with Yonhap News Agency held Wednesday. “If I count 180 tablets and someone talks to me or calls me, I have to start over. It takes hours. I wanted to remove these simple repetitive manual tasks and help pharmacies focus more on what they have to do, like patient care.”
Pilleye is an AI-powered app that can count up to 1,000 pills in an image with 99.99 percent accuracy, and it logs drug data. It is based on computer vision technology, which enables computers to recognize shapes, colors, and patterns of medicine. It is a single AI model that is able to process different formulations and packing for each country.
“It takes around 10 minutes to count manually 1,000 pills without distractions. With Pilleye, it takes only a few seconds to take a picture and analyze it,” he said. “In a controlled environment, Pilleye demonstrates 99.99 percent accuracy.”
The application has been welcomed by people working with medicine around the world who suffer from similar pill-counting stress. It is used by 400,000 people in more than 200 countries and territories, with 250,000 users from the United States, according to Medility. Park said Pilleye has an advantage over other foreign competitors due to its more accurate, faster, simpler, and cheaper model.
Park’s long-term plan is to grow Pilleye into a global pharmacy platform that helps pharmacies operate in a more efficient and patient-oriented way by reducing mundane tasks. He said he hopes to link the program with prescriptions received from patients and let druggists focus more on important tasks like dispensing medications and providing drug information.
brk@yna.co.kr
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