One of the priorities identified by the East Williston School District community for the next Five Year Strategic Plan is real world learning. As they begin to work on action plans to translate this priority into program implementation, ideas that have been discussed include guest speakers from the professional world, internships, and class and student projects that involve students applying the skills they learn to authentic projects.
Manan Shukla is not only a Wheatley senior who has participated in the Business Entrepreneurship class and Capstone Research project, he is an entrepreneur who has filed several patents for his five inventions and created a startup company, Adherety, that he hopes will improve health outcomes across the country.
Manan identified a significant problem found in the current healthcare system: physicians cannot treat their patients most effectively because they lack accurate patient information to make proper decisions. This manifests itself in particular with patients who do not accurately report their medication intake. More specifically, Manan’s device tackles the problem in which patients do not take their medication—something that results in over $300 billion dollars in healthcare waste and millions of patients entering the emergency rooms due to avoidable life-threatening complications.
As a result, Manan created a smart pill dispenser that uses IoT cloud connectivity to not only quantify patient behaviors and determine medication usage, but can also send this information to their physician so that patient treatment is based on objective data rather than inaccurate reporting. What makes his technology novel is that it costs less than a quarter, making it affordable for all patients.
This past summer, Manan was invited to meet the CEO of CVS to present his healthcare technology to the executive board of CVS Health. In addition, he will be meeting the COO of Walgreens and has garnered interest by Amazon, Berkshire Hathaway, and JP Morgan’s health initiative.
