A new gold standard in breast milk management & analytics for neonatal ICUs to improve process efficiency, patient safety and patient engagement.
There are archaic solutions at the NICU that ""pseudo-automate"" the process of breast milk management - like Timeless Medical, Safebaby, etc. These solutions run on clunky handheld barcode scanners which increases the nurses' time spent on such solutions. Breast milk tracking solutions from even mature companies like Epic and Cerner are simply a spin-off from their medication tracking solutions, which is inherently an incorrect way of managing breast milk. Then there are apps for mothers, which can track her pumping, but cannot share data with the clinicians due to lack of HIPAA compliance.
We are redefining this solution space, as there is no single solution providing an end-to-end automation from the mother to the nurses. With an innovative Software-as-a-Service approach, the Keriton Kare platform solves every single one of those problems. Our platform - Keriton Kare - covers the entire spectrum, alleviating not only the pain-points of manual breast milk management, but also providing analytics on how well moms are pumping and providing integrated patient engagement tools. Co-innovated with Penn Medicine nurses, for nurses, the platform significantly improves process efficiency, saving critical nurse time and reducing errors. With built in real-time analytics, lactation consultants can now proactively counsel struggling mothers, instead of reacting when it is too late. With automated notifications and text/audio/visual patient engagement solutions, the platform also notably enhances the pumping experience for mothers, resulting in improved pumping adherence and outcomes. We also track breast milk as a substance, as opposed to medication, which is the HL7 FHIR recommended method. This helps in truly aligning the automated process with the actual workflow of the clinicians in the NICU.
Keriton was born at the University of Pennsylvania in Spring 2016, where Vidur was pursuing his Masters in Robotics. A couple of nurses from Penn Medicine shared the multi-faceted problem of breast milk management & tracking at the world's largest hackathon - PennApps. Vidur had personally witnessed the scenario 5 years back when his sister had a pre-term delivery and his nephew was admitted to the NICU for 3 weeks. He decided to fix the problem and his proposed solution at the hackathon won 2nd prize. Post that victory, Keriton was incorporated in 40 days and Vidur made it his personal mission to improve the state of breast milk management across NICUs in US. He has since taken a leave of absence from Penn and is now pursuing Keriton full-time.
Keriton was incubated under DreamIt ventures, a top 10 digital health accelerator in the world, right from its inception. With financial support from DreamIt, Penn Medicine, AmeriHealth, Wharton and Dorm Room Fund, we closed our pre-seed round of $100K in 30 days. We have since been continuously working with the clinicians at Hospital of University of Pennsylvania (HUP, Penn Medicine) and have conducted several design thinking and user feedback sessions with them.
The Keriton team has spent countless hours in the NICU, listening to nurses, observing them go through the workflows, speaking with mothers and eventually running design thinking sessions with the several stakeholders to ensure that the an ideal solution is devised to this extremely complicated problem.
The feedback thus far has been extremely positive - ""This is the best NICU invention ever - NICU Nurse"" or ""Thank you so much for building this, this is perfect - NICU Mom"""
We have raised a total of $1.1M with $100K in our pre-seed round and $1M in our recently concluded seed round. Our seed round was lead by BioAdvance, with DreamIt & Penn Medicine re-investing as well.
Awards and Recognitions -
- Winner of Impact Pediatrics Pitch competition at South by South by West (SXSW) - March 2017
- Winner of Startup of the Year, PHL Geek Awards - Sep 2017
- Winning America’s Most Unique Small Business Award by PayChecx - Jan 2018
- Recognised as Top 10 Philly Startups to watch in 2018 by realList Technical.ly - Jan 2018
