Business
Portland Magazine
March 9, 2021
After his first-place win in UP’s 2020 Pilots Venture Challenge invention track, accounting major and Entrepreneur Scholar Ryan Jarvis ’21 took second place in the 2020 Invent Oregon State Finals in the fall. His venture product, Dose One Pill +, is a device Jarvis invented to organize and safely dispense prescription medications. While such devices are available now, Jarvis wants to set Dose apart by engineering simplicity, integrative technology, and affordability into his design—all needs he first encountered when caring for his grandmother.
“My Nanna’s kidneys started failing; she’d gotten a transplant from my mom in 1999, but now she needed dialysis and lots of new medications,” he says. Jarvis used a monthly pill planner to keep them organized, but when doctors changed medications, it was difficult to take pills out, add them in, or even identify which were which. “We’d go back and forth to Kaiser trying to find out what happened, why is she sick this time? It was rough,” he says.
He also witnessed casual misuse of medications by some of his friends. To look at the big picture, 18 million people misuse medications in the US each year; 12 million of those abuse opioids; of those 12 million, 130 die each day. Jarvis points to unfettered ease of access driving those numbers: “Once you get your prescription, there’s no way to prevent a person from taking them all at once or selling or sharing them. It’s also driven by what’s in mom and dad’s or grandma’s medicine cabinet.”
Jarvis decided to come up with a solution. He first designed locking caps that fit prescription bottles and dispense a single pill at a time. “You insert those in a centralized device, which scans barcodes which generate a dosage schedule—an accurate schedule, which also tracks dosing instructions and interactions with other drugs,” he says. “I call it the ‘Keurig’ principle. You can take the pill bottles out, but you can’t get the medication—or make coffee—without the machine.”University of Portland
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