Matt Shields – Pentalym

Matt Shields – Pentalym

In 2016, CSIRO project engineer and elite athlete Matt Shields suffered a near-fatal heart attack – saved thanks to his medical team, but also because the correct biomedical component (a stent) was in the right place at the right time. This experience made him start to see how his work on a parts tracking system for the Australian Square Kilometre Array Pathfinder (ASKAP) radio telescope could be applied to the medical world – more importantly to the biomedical devices supply chain.

Over the next few years Shields founded Pentalym, a company that catalogues and tracks medical devices – allowing hospitals and medical institutions to see where a device is at any given time, as well as how long it has been there for and when it is due to expire. The company launched in July 2020.

Some of the biggest challenges in the industry today result from the common trend of remote teams working from home, in different time zones. Supply chain issues, resource constraints and travel, lack of real time information and the deployment of complex projects using many tools and systems can also be hard to manage. Hence, Pentalym can manage end-to-end inventory management for all medical devices, including:

• Stock traceability management
• Product return management
• Stock ownership management
• Digital charge sheets
• Stock order management.

Pentalym creates a streamlined approach to inventory management for hospitals, removing the aspect of human error in record keeping and paperwork, most of which has been traditionally kept up-to-date by hand. Costing hospitals very little to implement, Pentalym works much like a supermarket scanner – reading a barcode attached to each device (tags are supplied to hospitals by Pentalym).

For manufacturers, Pentalym creates a more efficient process, allowing them to see how each device is used by hospitals, where supply chain costs can be reduced and how to ensure inventory waste is minimised.