Voices

New Mobile App Helps Parents Prevent Medication Mistakes

A busy Dallas mom, struggling to remember the right timing for giving fever reducers to her child, created and developed OnCure—an iOS app that aims to provide parents a comprehensive tool to manage OTC fever reducers.

When Hadas Kanner-Golan, a business and real estate lawyer and mother of 2, was looking for a comprehensive tool that would help her safely manage and track over-the-counter fever reducers she gave her kids, she couldn’t find one.  

She says there wasn’t anything on the market that could help parents through those exhausting days and nights spent caring for a sick child. She needed something that would eliminate the need to remember and calculate—two skills that are not well practiced during such a stressful time.

That’s when the idea for OnCure was conceived.

“There is a true need for a simple tool that will help minimize mistakes and provide parents with a much necessary peace of mind.”
Hadas Kanner-Golan

The magnitude of the problem, as shown by Kanner-Golan’s research, is alarming.

According to a study conducted over several years by Central Ohio Poison Center at Nationwide Children’s Hospital, children under the age of six in the U.S. are exposed to medication error by their parents or other caregivers every eight minutes (yep, minutes), and error rates spike during cold and flu season.

Why such high numbers? The reasons mentioned by the researchers are familiar to every parent: busy schedules, tiredness, “changing shifts” between caregivers, a new child in the family—all circumstances experienced every day by millions of families.

Hadas Kanner-Golan

“These findings cemented my realization that this is a real problem, putting our children at risk,” Kanner-Golan says. “There is a true need for a simple tool that will help minimize mistakes and provide parents with a much necessary peace of mind.”

The solution Hadas planned and developed—with the help of Five Pack Creative, a mobile app development and design agency based in Frisco—eventually evolved into the newly launched OnCure app. “They were passionate about my idea and helped bring my vision to life,” Kanner-Golan says.

OnCure provides parents and other caregivers a comprehensive, easy-to-use tool, by combining three key components:

  • Providing all of the information parents need to know through a clear, simple interface;
  • A unique, flexible, and dynamic schedule builder, allowing parents to space doses or change medicine and eliminating the need to set any reminders in advance, or make any calculations;
  • Updating all caregivers simultaneously (through OnCure Pro) so that taking notes, calling, or texting isn’t constantly necessary.

 

[Photo via OnCure]

Also, parents can opt to provide prescription information, if their child is getting one, to get a complete set of reminders. The app has been thoroughly reviewed and approved by a board-certified pediatrician, Dr. Justin Smith, who’s a native Texan and father of three.

“I’d like parents to think of OnCure as their trusted assistant, walking them safely through each episode of their child’s sickness, and providing them peace of mind when they need it most,” Dr. Smith says. “We are reviewing periodically to guarantee that the information provided to users is always up-to-date, and working on additional features to enhance users’ experience even further. With a new cold and flu season practically here, I believe that we can create a true impact and help reduce mistakes rates on a national level.”

OnCure is available on the App Store for download here.

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Lauren Hasson is the Founder of Develop[Her]  a career development platform for tech women by tech women, and a practicing software engineer at a prominent Bay Area fintech company where she’s bui(...)