Dad’s death leads to medical innovation

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Matt Reavill, of Plainfield, won an award for creating a medical device that reduces the risk of infection for patients who need a central line catheter. | Brett Roseman~Sun-Times Media

What’s a central line?

A central venous catheter, or central line, is a tube that doctors place in a large vein in the neck, chest, groin or arm to give a patient fluids, blood or medications or to do medical tests quickly. The long, flexible catheters empty out in or near the heart, delivering needed treatment in seconds.

Source: Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention

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Updated: December 2, 2011 8:10AM

PLAINFIELD — Germs are serious business for Matt Reavill.

His 59-year-old father survived heart surgery in 1994 only to die of an ensuing staph infection. The infection came from a central line catheter that was inserted into his dad’s heart through a large vein in his neck.

“He languished for 22 days,” Reavill said.

Central lines are used to administer medications and get diagnostic readings in patients. Now Reavill has invented a device that he says could have prevented his dad’s infection and thousands of others by stopping germs from entering the body during placement of a central line.

The invention, called the ReavillMED CV, won an international innovation award last month at the Health Pitch Battlefield competition sponsored by OmniCompete in London. Reavill pitted his product against four others, including a hip replacement that allowed patients to walk eight hours after surgery. Each competitor had just six minutes to describe their invention.

In announcing the winner, OmniCompete judges said, Reavill “developed a simple way to catheterize the heart without the need for creating a sterile field.”

Placed in patients nearly 5 million times per year, central lines also result in 20,000 deaths per year in the U.S. because of complications and infections, Reavill said.

He said his device is quicker, simpler and cleaner to use than the current procedure because it doesn’t require a medical professional to feed the catheter into a neck vein with a gloved hand. Instead, a syringe delivers a catheter already nestled in intravenous or IV tubing into an arm vein.

Floating catheter

Reavill was majoring in mechanical engineering at Southern Illinois University when he hit a class he couldn’t pass: fluid dynamic. So he switched his major to industrial engineering. Reavill, who grew up on a farm in downstate Robinson, graduated in 1988 and landed a job in New Jersey with the country’s biggest syringe maker.

He later switched to another company that was selling peripherally inserted central catheter lines, known as piccs. Similar to central lines, piccs are placed in the arm instead of the neck. Central lines take about 10-20 minutes to insert, and picc lines take even longer, about 30 minutes, Reavill said.

The picc lines weren’t selling very well and he lost his job as a sales manager in 2006. He came up with his own product when he was thinking of ways to improve the picc line.

“If you cut a picc line off and drop it into IV tubing, it would never be exposed to outside elements,” he said of his major breakthrough.

Instead of manually feeding the catheter into a vein, his device has a syringe that pushes the catheter into the blood, he said. There, circulation floats it to the heart in about 30 seconds.

The irony is not lost on Reavill: He couldn’t pass his fluid dynamics class in college, but his innovation relies on fluid dynamics to deliver the catheter to the heart.

Reavill said his device is less prone to infection or complications and is easier to use.

A normal picc line kit contains about 130 components, many of which are supposed to help create a sterile field. Reavill’s device uses only the catheter, IV tubing and a syringe.

A YouTube video shows how a medical professional would prime, trim and connect the device through the arm. To see it, go to YouTube.com and search for ReavillMED.

Waiting for an investor

Reavill secured FDA approval in December and hired a former colleague to help him market the new device. He sold portions of his company to stay solvent during the past few years and depleted his own savings.

A few hospitals are studying Reavill’s product. All he needs is one hospital to use it and others will follow, he said.

“They just want to see somebody else go first,” he said. “In health care, nobody wants to be a maverick.”

Reavill said his wife, Jane “Kitty” Reavill and his five kids have been patiently waiting for his invention to become a reality. And Reavill thinks that his international trophy will help him find the investor he needs to take the next step.

“Having won that little thing right there puts us as the best health-care investment on the planet,” he said.

Reavill believes his believes his device will do well in the market. It has to, he said, to prevent the kind of infections that killed his father.

“A hospital and broken skin are a deadly combination,” Reavill said.