Liliana Barcenas wins Rep. Chuy García’s 2024 Congressional App Challenge in Illinois’ Fourth District

When asked what inspired the creation of PharmaTrack, the student said, “For a large part of my life my father has felt unwell. He has visited a wide range of hospitals and a variety of specialists in hopes to alleviate his pain. I have accompanied him to his blood and iron transfusions, his appointments and his studies. Additionally, my mother and I would accompany my grandparents to their appointments.  Through these experiences, I have found that the most troubling part was keeping track of their vast medicines and the extensive medical history with them. Oftentimes, my family members would have side effects with their medications and need to get something newly prescribed. The problem though was that they had already tried so many combinations of medicines and dosages that either they couldn’t remember which medication had caused them what side effect or which medications they had not already tried. Currently, hospitals have their individual apps and although information is shared, from a patient’s perspective, there is no one, centralized list. My mom often carried multiple file folders with patient summaries from previous visits but I found that papers were often easy to forget which is why I wanted to allow history to be tracked through an app on one’s phone. Additionally, nowadays it takes forever to get a doctor’s appointment and by the time you do you might forget what exactly were your side effects and yes you could have written it on paper but again papers are easy to forget. You are already sick. You want something simple, something easy to take a load off your back. Lastly, Doctors have so many different patients and while they might be really good doctors it can be hard to keep track of all their patients even when they have some information on file.”