Healthcare Analyst: Osteomyelitis Treatment 

Flow-FX LLC

Mentors 

Patrick Sweeney MD — Founder and CEO
Ryan Wright — VP of Business Development

Background

Flow-FX LLC is a medical device start-up focused on medical devices for delivering medicine to bone. 2 product lines, Flow-Nail and Flow-Screw, are 510k cleared by the FDA for fracture fixation and delivery of injectable bone void fillers. Flow-Drill and Flow-Needle, 2 product families coming to market this year are Class 1, 510(k) exempt manual instruments designed to deliver biologics to bone. Recently an off-label usage of the Flow-Screw enabled the delivery of antibiotics intraosseously to the site of chronic infection in an elderly diabetic patient that had failed previous treatment, including partial resection of the infected calcaneus (heel). After 10 days of treatment by local delivery of antibiotics through the Flow-Screw, infection was mostly cured. We hypothesize that circumventing the diseased peripheral arteries to allow therapeutic levels of medication to be achieved and reaching high local concentrations lead to this success. Our 2018 myCHOICE intern researched, co-authored, and subsequently published a very comprehensive review article regarding this potential treatment method for Diabetic Osteomyelitis:

Terese Geraghty & Guido LaPorta (2019) Current health and economic burden of chronic diabetic osteomyelitis, Expert Review of Pharmacoeconomics & Outcomes Research, DOI: 10.1080/14737167.2019.1567337

By inference, this also offers a new modality to treat chronic post-traumatic osteomyelitis which is also a world-wide healthcare problem especially in the developing world in addition to our soldiers injured on the battlefield.

Internship Description

• Develop a cost-consequence model from a national and international perspective evaluating the clinical benefits of increased treatment success along with subsequent decreased amputations, hospital stay, debridement surgeries, wound care and extended antibiotic delivery.
• Access to surgeons, wound clinics and hospital personnel can be arranged if helpful.

.

Specific Objectives

• Cost-benefit Analysis for US and international healthcare through adoption of more successful treatment methods for post- traumatic osteomyelitis.
• Recommendations for clinical research design to evaluate the new methods’ success in comparison to current norms.
• Final product worthy of being presented by intern in various national forums.
• Final product worthy of submission to appropriate journals with intern as first author.

.

Qualifications

• Current Graduate student or postdoctoral trainee
• Interest in public health policy or the field of medicine
• Strong work ethic and ability to work independently while incorporating advice of mentors
• Well-developed verbal and written communication skills
• Demonstrated data analytical skills
• Useful but not required- previous clinical medicine exposure, Bilingual English/ Spanish