Sue Carr clearly remembers the moment that pushed her to become a full-time entrepreneur.
In 2018, Carr was working at a hospital in Montgomery County and responding to a critical situation in the emergency room. She had to administer life-saving medication that was packaged in a glass ampoule — a small glass vial with a bottle head — to a patient.
To open the ampoule, the bottle head must be broken off, which Carr said results in glass shards getting in medication.
The medicine has to be withdrawn into a syringe with a filter needle, and that filter needle has to be replaced with another hypodermic needle, so no glass is delivered along with the medicine.
Carr recalled frantically searching for a filter needle while others watched her, but nobody could find one — so the medication was administered without filtering the glass out. The patient died, although Carr doesn’t know if the unfiltered medication contributed to their death.
“That made me jump off the cliff and leave a full-time job with a paycheck and start my journey as an entrepreneur,” she said. “I started journaling then, and the first lines of my journal are ... ‘You have to hit rock bottom to get back up.’”
Carr, the president and founder of CarrTech, has created a product called FROG to minimize the potential risks of administering medication from a glass ampoule. FROG stands for Filter Removal of Glass.
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