Starting soon at Penn Medicine, nurses working in the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) will have a brand new way to label and track the breast milk being delivered to the hospital by mothers to their premature babies.
Enter Keriton, a graduate of Philadelphia’s DreamIt Health accelerator’s 2016 cohort that employs four at an office inside Drexel University’s incubator IC@3401. Founded by CEO Vidur Bhatnagar, an engineer by trade, Keriton makes use of a suite of smartphone apps and preprinted barcode labels to automate in-hospital breast milk management for NICU nurses.
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“We know it’s a new product, but we are very confident about how we are going about this. We’ve observed the NICU, we’ve spoken to moms, we’ve spoken to a lot of different hospitals,” Bhatnagar said in a phone interview.
For nurses in the NICU, two of their most important tasks are making sure new mothers are pumping enough breast milk and matching the right milk to the right baby.
It’s a task easier said than done. About six nurses might work in the average NICU, and for every infant in their care, they might be tracking between 12 and 16 bottles daily that are sent by mothers to the hospital. In each case, it can take about 20 minutes to copy down the relevant information to make sure the right milk gets to the right baby, as well as keep track of whether milk already delivered has expired.
With Keriton, that work is now automated on a HIPAA-compliant app system — three apps for the hospital staff, and one app for the mother at home. The hospital can keep track of breast milk management and lactation analytics, as well as chat with a mother at home if she’s not pumping enough milk. Keriton Kare Mom, the mom-specific app, creates a log for the mother to track how much milk she is pumping. Nurses are also able to send photos of a mother’s baby in the NICU.
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“We try to engage mom by giving her the right kind of stimuli while she’s pumping, like showing her the photo of her baby,” said Bhatnagar.
Keriton’s system is similar to others on the market today, although it combines the functions that happen inside and outside the hospital. Peekaboo ICU, a North Carolina company, released its own app last October for parents with babies in a NICU. Peekaboo’s app also records a mother’s breast milk pumping sessions and milk production. On the enterprise side, Timeless Medical Systems, which has offices in Kentucky and Canada, creates a barcoding system for nurses to track and prepare breast milk for NICU babies.
Ensuring premature babies receive breast milk is a critical task. Getting breast milk builds up premature babies’ immature immune systems because the milk delivers the antibodies to fight off infections, as well as the nutrients premature babies need to be safe from maladies like retinopathy of prematurity, a condition that causes as many as 600 children to go blind in the U.S., each year. (It’s the reason musician Stevie Wonder, who was born premature, eventually went blind.)
In addition to Keriton’s four employees working in University City, another two software developers work in India, where Bhatnagar is from originally. In 2015, he left his engineering job at SAP India to attend a master’s program in robotics at the University of Pennsylvania. He put his master’s degree on hold in 2016 to pursue Keriton — an idea that grew out of a weekend of coding at last year’s PennApps hackathon — full-time.
“I just love to solve orchestration problems, [and] nurses spend a lot of time doing data entry. At SAP, I learned that no data should have to be re-entered if it’s been entered once,” Bhatnagar said.
He didn’t know it at the time, but Bhatnagar was already on his way to being a medical entrepreneur even before stepping foot on Penn’s campus. Five years ago, Bhatnagar’s nephew was born three weeks premature and, with fluid in his lungs, was admitted to the hospital. His sister, the baby’s mother, was sent home, unable to directly feed her newborn.
“It just stuck with me that my sister was crying for three days and was not able to feed her child,” he recalled.
With Keriton, Bhatnagar hopes to help out mothers as well. The startup recently raised $1 million to begin piloting its technology in several hospitals throughout the U.S. It also plans to work with Penn Medicine, Bhatnagar said.
Photo: metinkiyak, Getty Images