This app optimizes caring for NICU babies, with a lofty goal to eliminate feeding errors

Feeding a newborn can be challenging in the best of situations, but for newborns in intensive care, the logistics are truly complex.

Breastfeeding is particularly beneficial for low-birthweight premature babies, and particularly challenging. Physical contact between a mother and newborn helps with the continued production of milk, something moms with babies in a neonatal intensive care unit (NICU) may have to postpone for days, weeks or even months. 

Breastmilk-fed babies need to be matched with their own specific feed order including any necessary medications mixed with their mother’s milk. It’s so precise that accidentally feeding the wrong bottle to an infant can be catastrophic. Without technology, nurses use manual spreadsheets and calculate recipes with calculators, and errors, though rare, happen.

In 2016, Laura Carpenter, a lactation consultant with the Hospital at the University of Pennsylvania, set out to find a better way to manage breast milk feeding in the NICU. She wasn’t a technologist herself, so she brought the challenge to a hackathon at Penn Center for Innovation. 

The topic struck a chord with Vidur Bhatnagar, a hackathon participant who had personal experience with the NICU from the patient side. Bhatnagar would become the founder of Keriton, a NICU feeding technology app now used in dozens of hospitals across the country.

“It’s a classic story of a provider identifying a clinical need and being very frustrated with a complex workflow that was leading to patient safety issues,” Adam Dakin, CEO of Keriton, told Technical.ly.

Focusing on neonatal care for nurses and parents

The platform has two major components: the NICU nurse component, and the patient component. In the NICU, the app is used to scan barcodes on bottles, refrigerators and freezers, tracking the exact location, contents and expiration date of every bottle of milk or formula in real-time. The patient component allows for HIPAA-compliant communication between NICU nurses and parents, including a tracking system for milk pumped at home so the NICU knows when they need to replenish milk from the home freezer to the hospital.

“If you think of this as supply chain management, the supply chain starts with mom pumping it, and then it has to go from the family to the NICU, and then eventually get to the patient,” Dakin said. “How can you manage a supply chain if you don’t have communication with your supplier?”

That communication is good for logistics, and also for the mental health of families during an emotionally turbulent time. Nurses can easily update parents, and parents can easily contact the NICU without having to leave phone messages. Nurses can also send real-time photos of the baby through the app, which can help with milk production.

At the core of the technology, though, is the barcode-based system designed to not only reduce feeding errors but eliminate them. And, Dakin says, there are more potential errors than feeding the wrong milk to the wrong baby. Feeding orders from the doctor are complicated and may have 25 or more variables that have to be mixed with the milk. NICU nurses have been “bedside bartenders,” using pocket calculators to mix the orders. The Keriton app automates the calculations. 

”If you stay within the platform, you don’t make mistakes,” Dakin said. “Instead, it’s a near miss. We’ve prevented over 60,000 feeding errors in real-time.”

That’s out of about 2.5 million feeds at this point. Currently, Keriton is either live or under contract with 62 hospitals and health systems in the US, including Jefferson Health in Philadelphia, New York Presbyterian and one of its newest partners, Intermountain Healthcare, a major healthcare system in the western US.

The evolution of a support system

Sixty-two health systems is a long way from when Keriton’s VP of sales and clinical strategy Dominic Petrovia, a former nurse of 20 years, first encountered the app at Penn Medicine several years ago.

“I was a nurse at the time, and I was handed a phone and told, this is how you scan milk,” Petrovia told Technical.ly. “I had been a NICU nurse at that point for over 10 years. I had seen a lot of things in my clinical practice as a nursing leader, director and patient care nurse. And I said, if this is safe, and we’re actually making a difference and making the work easier for our nursing staff, I want to jump on this train.” 

Keriton doesn’t share its financials publicly, but they’ve raised about $3 million in VC funding from investors including BioAdvance Capital, DreamIt Ventures and Ben Franklin Technology Partners, as well as angel investors, including several from Broad Street Angels. When Dakin joined the company as CEO in March of 2024, there was a small bridge round to help it get to the next level, which, Dakin says, includes scaling the commercial side of the business and expanding the technology to include AI to make it even more efficient and personalized.

“We have access to a very unique data set, because we have access to all the feeding and nutritional information, and the sort of the growth and clinical information on the patient,” Dakin said. “It puts us in a unique position to apply analytics and AI to develop — we are evolving into a true clinical decision support system.”