MedAssess wins Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez’s 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Mexico’s Third District
Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez has named Isabella Kelly McTeigue from Los Alamos High School as the winner of the 2021 Congressional App Challenge in New Mexico’s Third District.
When asked what inspired the creation of MedAssess, the student said, “I have family friends who have had trouble getting the correct amount of prescriptions or consuming them at the right time leading to bad side effects. A friend of mine was hospitalized after feeling dizzy and collapsing. He was taking 13 different prescribed medications. After assessment during his hospitalization, he was reduced to 8 different medications and less potent dosages. They found that he had been given the incorrect combination and dosages which lead to his collapse. I wanted to reduce the risk of people dying because of these mistakes with the informative MedAssess app. Because of incidents like this, wrong medication and dosage have become the 8th leading cause of death. MedAssess can help inform users on combining medications, the symptoms that come with it, and the requests that can be made to fix any problems.”
The 2021 Congressional App Challenge yielded 2,101 fully functioning apps. After eighteen months of disruptions to educational cadences for students everywhere, the Congressional App Challenge came roaring back with 7,174 students registering for this year’s competition. All told, 340 Members of Congress hosted Congressional App Challenges in their districts across 50 states, Puerto Rico, Guam, the Mariana Islands, the U.S. Virgin Islands, and Washington, D.C.
The Congressional App Challenge is an official initiative of the U.S. House of Representatives, where Members of Congress host contests in their districts for middle school and high school students, encouraging them to learn to code and inspiring them to pursue careers in computer science. Each participating Member of Congress selects a winning app from their district, and each winning team is invited to showcase their winning app to Congress during our annual #HouseOfCode festival. The program is a public-private partnership made possible through funding from Omidyar Network, AWS, theCoderSchool, Facebook, Replit, Accenture, and others.
The 2022 Congressional App Challenge will launch in June of 2022, and eligible students can pre-register for the competition now.