MedAware vs NarxCare (2026)
Both score a prescribing situation for risk, and they point at opposite risks. Almost nobody buys one against the other, but comparing them shows what a wrong answer costs. NarxCare scores the patient. It draws on state prescription monitoring data and shows controlled substance scores, including an Overdose Risk Score, to the prescriber or pharmacist at the moment of decision. MedAware scores the prescription. It flags orders that do not fit this patient by detecting outliers in longitudinal clinical data, and hospital investigators at four sites have published on it. The difference that matters is the cost of a false positive. A false MedAware alert costs a pharmacist a few minutes. A false controlled substance score can mean a patient in pain is refused treatment. An independent study of the narcotics score found its false positives concentrated among patients reporting disability, poor health and greater pain. No comparable results by patient group are published for the Overdose Risk Score.
- It looks at the prescription rather than the patient's history, flagging orders that do not fit this patient through outlier detection over longitudinal clinical data.
- Hospital investigators at four sites have published on it, two of them with alerts firing live. At Sheba Medical Center, 89 percent of 315 alerts were judged accurate.
- Output is an alert to a prescriber or pharmacist who decides. The system never acts on a medication.
- It draws on state prescription monitoring data rather than one hospital's record, so it sees prescriptions written elsewhere.
- It often reaches prescribers through the state program rather than through a separate purchase.
- Bamboo publishes its security certifications in a trust center, and an independent evaluation reports where the narcotics score errs across patient groups.
This comparison is published by AI Health Index, an independent research platform that compares healthcare AI vendors objectively. MedAware and NarxCare are each graded against the same capability taxonomy, from each vendor's own public materials and the regulatory record, under the AI Health Index verification standard. No vendor pays for placement, and no vendor has reviewed this page. How this evidence is graded
Plain facts
| Fact | MedAware | NarxCare |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Medication Safety & Prescribing | Medication Safety & Prescribing |
| Founded | 2012 | Not recorded |
| Headquarters | Ra'anana, Israel | Louisville, Kentucky, United States |
| Website | medaware.com | bamboohealth.com |
Side by Side
Select any grade to read the note behind it.
Each vendor in one paragraph
Written to be quoted whole. Each paragraph opens the AI Health Index profile of the vendor: what the product is, who buys it and what it does.
MedAware is an Israeli company whose platform monitors prescribing for medication related risk using machine learning rather than the rule libraries that conventional medication decision support runs on. It was founded in 2012 after a nine year old asthma patient died because his physician selected the wrong drug from an electronic prescribing dropdown, an error no interaction rule was written to catch, because nothing in the prescription broke a rule; the drug was simply wrong for that patient.
Source: AI Health Index, September 2026
NarxCare is a set of scores and visualizations layered on top of state Prescription Drug Monitoring Program data, built by Bamboo Health, formerly Appriss Health, which also supplies the underlying platform for more than 40 state and territory monitoring programs. It reaches hundreds of healthcare facilities and, by the company's account, five of the six largest pharmacy retailers, embedded in record systems such as Epic, Oracle Health, Meditech and eClinicalWorks through Bamboo's PMP Gateway.
Source: AI Health Index, September 2026
Questions buyers ask
How do MedAware and NarxCare work with the EHR?
At Ballad Health the acute care pharmacy team began operating MedAware natively inside an Epic pharmacy workflow in October 2024, following a partnership announced in July 2023 and confirmed on the health system's own newsroom.
PMP Gateway, the managed service that carries NarxCare, embeds monitoring program data and scores in the clinical workflow: the record system sends a patient query and the report and scores return inside the EHR or pharmacy system. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How are MedAware and NarxCare priced and sold?
MedAware publishes no price, no unit, no pricing mechanism, no contract shape and no implementation fee guidance. It sells directly to health systems and to physician practices through the athenahealth Marketplace, but nothing says what drives the cost on either route.
States contract with Bamboo for the monitoring platform, and health systems and pharmacies reach NarxCare through PMP Gateway integration into their record systems. Bamboo's integration materials for state programs, such as its Minnesota welcome packet, describe state funded integration, so whether a facility pays depends on its state. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
How do MedAware and NarxCare handle patient data?
Published material describes what the system does with the data clinically without describing what happens to the data operationally: MedAware publishes no retention period, no de identification practice, no minimum necessary scoping and no statement of whether customer data contributes to model development across institutions.
In NarxCare's case, the data is a longitudinal record of every controlled substance a person has been dispensed, and the repository is the state's. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Which settings and specialties do MedAware and NarxCare cover?
For MedAware, inpatient acute care is confirmed by the Ballad Health pharmacy deployment, ambulatory care by the athenahealth Marketplace listing and by the Brigham and Women's and Massachusetts General outpatient datasets that produced the evidence base, and the company publishes material aimed at deprescribing in post acute and long term care.
With NarxCare, the score reaches emergency departments, primary care, dentistry, surgery, behavioral health and retail pharmacy across more than 40 states and territories, and it applies to every adult and pediatric patient with a controlled substance history rather than to a selected population. Validation covers part of that: the overdose score was validated on patients in three states and the narcotics score in pharmacies in two. From the AI Health Index, drawn from each vendor's own published materials and the regulatory record, verified September 20, 2026. No vendor pays for placement.
Related comparisons
Other published head to head assessments involving these vendors or their closest peers. The full set for this category is on the Clinical Decision Support page.
Risk scoring on controlled substance history carries a consequence found nowhere else in this category: a false positive can mean a refused prescription. The scored behaviors, such as pharmacy counts, prescriber counts and distance traveled, can track access to care as well as risk, so ask how the scores behave for rural patients and for patients who have moved.
For NarxCare, the independent Cochran evaluation reports where the narcotics score errs across patient groups, and Bamboo publishes no such results for the Overdose Risk Score. For MedAware, the published studies report how often alerts are right, but none reports performance by patient group. Neither vendor publishes a price. MedAware publishes no security attestation and states no HIPAA or business associate status.