John Ferrara a second-year Journalism, Economics and data science student at Northwestern University will no longer be with us next school year.
[natural sound: Gasp]
Don’t worry he is very much alive and will be moving on to pursue his start-up which is projected to be worth four million dollars.
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[JOHN FERRARA] “Yeah. So, um, yeah, currently the assumption is that I’ll, you know, be taking, um, I won’t be coming back in the fall and for the foreseeable future just because, um, we have enough traction, like I said, with the hospitals that we’re working with that are, um, pretty sizable, that it’s, you know, that it mandates kind of my full attention.” I, I, right now I’m working full-time hours on top of school and, um, you know, startups, startups require more than full-time hours.”
Ferrara along with his partner and Northwestern student Hasan Aybaz are working on a startup called Juxta, which is an app that would improve the process of transporting patients in hospitals.
[HASAN AYBAZ]“Juxta is like a ride-hailing app for hospitals where nurses are able to put in requests for, uh, patient transfers from room to room, um, and PTs, patient transfers, uh, uh, can take these requests, uh, and basically accept them and transport the patients. So my role has been to, uh, build, build, build the, build the service from top to down basically.”
That was Hasan Aybaz a first-year computer engineering and math student here at Northwestern, who has worked with John on a previous startup. Aybaz now works on the coding aspect of Juxta. Aybaz says that doctors, nurses and administrators can connect the app to trackers placed on hospital beds and the app will generate a heat map of the hospital that can be followed.
[AYBAZ] “Uh, we also provide very nice analytics data, since we have all these geospatial data, uh, in regards to where, uh, patient transporters have been, and, uh, where patients have been. So say there’s an infected patient, we can provide the, uh, provide like a heat map of the hospital where, uh, this, uh, infection might be a problem.”
Primary care physician, Vivek Kantayya, who formerly worked as an obstetrician for 23 years at Swedish American Hospital in Rockford Illinois says that poor communication in hospitals can be life-threatening for patients.
[VIVEK KANTAYYA] Even minutes can make a big difference. So if, if you get the lab results and you’re having trouble tracking down the, the nurse or the patient, uh, even minutes could lead to, uh, more morbidity and mortality based on not getting the blood transfusion done in time or not getting, uh, a medication to a person in time, uh, because, uh, some people are so sick that you need to get the antibiotic started right away or the blood transfusion started right away. Or yes, they could, they could have something that may not be completely as bad as dying, but it could lead to morbidity and complications that are unnecessary.”
Ferrara says that he has been doing start-ups since he was just fourteen years old. His inspiration for Juxta came from growing up with parents who have a healthcare background.
[FERRARA] “So my, uh, actually I come from a healthcare background. My mom is a pediatrician in the Navy. My dad, uh, was also, is also a radiologist who served in the Navy, um, was the chief medical officer of the Navy. So, you know, I’ve kind of grown up in hospitals. I know the, the clientele, which in our case is hospital admin very well. My parents have both worked in admin, um, to varying degrees. And yeah, I mean, it was a problem that I knew- I was aware of because I, honestly, they’d come home late frequently, largely attributing to the fact that they were, they were kind of waiting for a patient to be transported to them during an operation or a, or a surgery or just seeing a patient in general. But it was more than I was able to just realize that, hey, this is affecting someone kind of at every level of the hospital.”
Ferrara’s partner Aybaz, joined Juxta because of the technical challenge and he is also planning to leave Northwestern to pursue the start-up full-time.
[AYBAZ] “Yeah, of course, like I’ll miss some great people here. I came here, obviously, I came here from Turkey and really, really, really, really nice people and I really like the Chicago area, but it is what it is what it is. Sometimes you have to sacrifice and that’s, that’s a part of the deal.”
Both Aybaz and Ferrara are aware of the risks of not getting a degree but Ferrara is rather hopeful that things will work out.
[FERRARA] “So, there’s no, to me, like I’m just kind of, I’ve always been someone where, you know, I really want to try to seize an opportunity when it’s there. And just kind of go with it and see how far it’s taken, it’ll take me and in the past that served me very well. And I think it’s for a reason. I think when you take a risk like that, it usually, you know, whether it’s because you’re kind of acting a little bit more of necessity, it makes you move faster with more urgency and more precision. Or if it’s just because, you know, the risk, you know, you get rewarded for taking risk. I just think it generally works out, but that might be naive. And if that is naive, you know, I have faith that I can, that I’ll be able to come back to a school, whether it’s Northwestern or, you know, a state school, um, that I, that I would go to instead. You know, I, I think that I can get that degree, um, anytime. Whereas with Juxta, you know, I have, I have this opportunity with fundraising on the table right now. These hospitals are interested right now. Um, so that’s what I’m going to pursue.”
[Music: Instrumental beat by Moriah Pettway/ Heartfelt guitar music]
Ferrara is not sure where he will be located this coming school year but he will miss the relationships he has built here at Northwestern.
[Music: Instrumental beat by Moriah Pettway/ Heartfelt guitar music]
Music by Moriah Pettway
For WNUR News I’m Moriah Pettway.
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