Students develop app to suit needs of medical employees

It’s got a relaxing name, but the creators of this app put quite a lot of hard work into it. It will take such effort to keep up with the explosive markets of mobile apps and medicine, and SPA joins the dichotomy quite nicely.
The Strategic Pricing Aid (SPA) phone application was developed by a team of three aspiring Stevens students: a computer science major, Vania Nettleford ’15, and biomedical engineering majors, Ruchika Sharma ’14 and Jen Trinh ’13. Each team member provided her expertise in both programming and medical nuances to create an all-encompassing app to best suit the needs of hospital employees. The app serves to expedite the purchase of invaluable medical devices for time-sensitive measures involved in the hustle-and-bustle of work in hospitals and laboratories.
“Sales reps typically use lots and lots of Excel documents to keep track of internal product pricing, and this information updates frequently,” remarked Nettleford, who studies programming at Stevens. “We’re talking about thousands of lines. We decided to host all that data in the cloud, and then we created an app which pulled from that data anytime an update was made.”
Though SPA began development only a few months ago, this app has great potential to be successful – so successful that it has already won a $2,000 grant prize from the reputable Case Competition conducted by the Cordis Corporation, a subsidiary of the popular pharmaceutical firm Johnson & Johnson, which manufactures global medical devices. It is based in Bridgewater Township, New Jersey.
As of now, the app is not yet available to the public and is only available on iOS, but with the grant and other financial and developmental aid from Cordis, the team hopes to expand their service onto other well-known platforms.
This project also exemplifies the prominence of female scientists and engineers studying at Stevens and the works they produce for the real world ahead. Recently, Stevens was awarded a $550,000 grant from the National Science Foundation on the basis of such prominence by women in STEM at the university, and the SPA team shows exemplary progress of that idea.
“We look forward to the development of this application and other products of brilliant students that could help the medical industry,” noted Lisa Mancato, a representative for Cordis and judge of the competition. “I believe that great success can arise from the work of Stevens students.”
There you have it, Stevens. Whether you’re headed for the pharmaceutical realm or not, we’re all going to leave this school helping the world with convenience and achievement, as the SPA team already has. The world is already looking forward to it.