Team 6

D.R.I.P. - Drug Release Intelligence Pipeline

Team Members:

Trixia Dela Rosa

Natalie Guzman

Emma Lieberman

Antara Sira

Jennifer Smetanick

Team Mentors:
J.M.R. Apollo Arquiza - Arizona State University

James Bogert, MD - Dignity Health

Devyn Weber, BSN - Dignity Health

YouTube Link:
View the video link below before joining the zoom meeting

Zoom Link:
https://asu.zoom.us/j/81805208483

Abstract

Critically ill hospital patients often need multiple intravenous (IV) medications and blood products administered to them quickly. Due to the biochemistry of the medications involved, many drugs cannot be mixed prior to entrance of the body. The decision of which medication or blood products will run in the same IV or central line is currently determined by bedside caregivers and thus creates the risk of mixing incompatible medications due to human error. This also often results in an overwhelming number of IV ports for the patient, which adds discomfort. Additionally, critically ill patients often need emergency transportation, where an excessive number of medication lines can pose added risk during loading, unloading, and emergency drug administration en route. Through identifying customer needs assessments, determining competitive benchmarking, and focusing on target value specifications, our team developed a Drug Release Intelligence Pipeline (DRIP) to safely combine many compatible medications down to a mere few IVs. This device will streamline the process of introducing a new medication safely to a trauma patient. Our device will indicate to doctors and nurses which pipelines contain compatible medications, and will reduce the risk of human error when administering new drugs. This small, portable, and intuitive-use device is compatible with existing systems, notifies caretakers of potential errors, and reduces the number of lines entering the patient. We predict utilizing 3D printing, MATLAB for modeling of drug flow, and machine shop techniques to embody our initial prototype. DRIP aims to eliminate potentially life threatening medication-mixing errors, relieve the stressful responsibility of drug compatibility checks from doctors and nurses, reduce discomfort of multiple IVs for the patients, and provide an innovative solution for improved drug release pipelines.