OcciGuide

About OcciGuide

OcciGuide guides occipital nerve blocks (ONB), enabling any practitioner - physician, nurse practitioner, physician assistant, first responder or medic - to provide targeted, quick acting, long lasting relief from headache pain without side effects, sedation, or impact on cognitive function. With OcciGuide, ONB can be used as a first line therapy for acute headache pain in any care setting or environment. OcciGuide can have a significant impact on reducing care disparities in environments where opioid use is highly prevalent for treating headache and specialist care is often not available.
OcciGuide can be used to treat most headache types, including migraine, post traumatic headache and medication overuse headache.

Tagged with

Medical DevicesHealthcare

Team

Jillian Fink

Founder

Problem statement

Headache is the 3rd highest cause of disability worldwide and migraine is the 1st leading cause of disability in people under 50. Many treatments for acute headache are short acting, provide partial relief, and cause multiple side effects. Despite significant documentation that opioids have poor efficacy, negative side effect and a high abuse potential they are also used to manage acute headache pain, especially after other medications have failed.

Occipital nerve blocks (ONB) offer a better treatment option, providing rapid onset pain relief that can last for an average of 2 weeks. Unfortunately, access to this procedure is very limited. ONB are overwhelmingly performed by specialists, who generally are not first line providers for headache patients. ONB are rarely used in the acute care settings despite numerous advantages and opioids are used in almost half of the headache visits in urban and rural ERs.

Traction information

OcciGuide is a class I device, listed with the FDA and available for sale in the US.
We completed a study at a medical center emergency room and demonstrated double the average pain score reduction and a 20% higher discharge rate from the ER compared to traditional treatment methods.

OcciGuide has been purchased by a hospital system and is being rolled out through their 16 emergency care centers. We have received multiple re-orders and are working towards placing OcciGuide in other hospital systems.