‘Why doesn’t this exist yet?’ Bradenton high school students honored for medical app

A simple mistake could have catastrophic results in the health care industry. When it comes to medication errors, the consequence is thousands of deaths each year.

The national problem became personal for a group of students at Braden River High School after they learned of a classmate’s frightening story.

“A medical professional — doctor, nurse, whoever was in charge of him — miscalculated the dosage and over-administered the medicine by an incredible amount,” Jordan Sheehan said. “He almost lost his life because of it.”

Sheehan, a senior at Braden River High, joined three peers from a campus chapter of the Technology Student Association and got to work on a solution. They learned about medication errors and the use of pen-and-paper math in health care settings.

How could health professionals still be calculating the proper dosage by hand in 2020, his team wondered. Their invention, a medical dosage calculator, has since earned them recognition from U.S. Rep Vern Buchanan.

The congressman announced that Sheehan, Ava Biasini, Kolby Wade and Nolwen Bachtle won the 16th Congressional District App Challenge for their mobile program, Valitudo. The prototype, which is not yet available to the public, includes a dosage calculator and a medicine database.

Medical providers would input their patient’s condition, age, weight and medication into the mobile application. Valitudo would then respond with a proper dosage — no pen, paper or math required.

“I can’t commend them enough for inventing such an important and potentially life-saving tool,” Buchanan said in a prepared statement.

Sheehan said he worked on the app development with teammates Wade and Bachtle, who spent countless hours building the equations and drug facts into the program.

Biasini took the lead on research. Before they could develop an app, the team needed a firm understanding of the problem, the calculations and the drugs in their database.

Their goal was to simplify the job of treating patients with an appropriate medication and dosage. With its built-in equations and simple interface, Valitudo could lessen the chance of human error.

“This is an age where there’s an app for everything,” Sheehan said.

“We were so focused on it being used in high-stakes environments like a hospital,” he continued. “A doctor on the fly needs to calculate something. As we kept going we realized it could be used in a bunch of different places.”

The app could one day land in app stores, pharmacies and doctors’ offices, but not without a critical review. The next step, Sheehan said, was to verify their research, speak with medical professionals and strengthen the app based on their feedback.

Their efforts may help to solve a pervasive issue in America, where medication errors kill 7,000 to 9,000 people every year, according to research shared by the National Center for Biotechnology Information.

The problem affects millions of patients and results in more than $40 billion in annual medical costs. The patients suffer not only financially, but also physically and mentally, with some harboring new distrust for the health care system.

The article, “Medication Dispensing Errors and Prevention,” was authored by experts from hospitals and universities throughout the country.

“The most common reasons for errors include failure to communicate drug orders, illegible handwriting, wrong drug selection chosen from a drop-down menu, confusion over similarly named drugs, confusion over similar packaging between products, or errors involving dosing units or weight,” it states.

While it was no cure-all solution, Valitudo aspires to solve one of the many problems that lead to medication error, hardship and death.

Its creators — Sheehan, Biasini, Wade and Bachtle — were up for the challenge.

“This is something that’s easily preventable,” Sheehan said. “Why doesn’t this exist yet?”