U Deliver Medical helps feed ventilated patients
U Deliver Medical’s founders worked with home tube-feeders, leading healthcare providers, caregivers and durable medical equipment companies to design the bFed system, which the Hopkins, Minn.-based startup describes as the first tube-feeding delivery system created specifically for people to use at home.
U Deliver launched bFed in 2018. The bag-and-tube system comes in different sizes to work with commercially available foods developed for tube feeding — including those made by Nestlé HealthScience. When the number of seriously ill COVID-19 patients who needed ventilators surged, U Deliver worked with Nestlé to develop a way to use the bFed system to feed ventilated patients. The systems were then provided to healthcare centers, including Cleveland Clinic, MD Anderson and Duke University Hospital, according to Medical Alley.