KAREN WOOLSTRUM , University of Pittsburgh Office of Innovation & Entrepreneurship; Pitt School of Medicine Student Innovator is Empowering People to Take Charge of Their Healthcare
"Inspiration Strikes in the ER
While her research focuses on cystic fibrosis, Li’s entrepreneurial journey began during a rotation in the emergency room. It dawned on her that many patients in the ER could be empowered to take control of their own health monitoring and potentially avoid traumatic and costly ER visits. She quickly devised an idea for an electronic stethoscope that people can use to measure vital signs of the heart and lungs from home.
In collaboration with a friend, Akshaya Anand, a machine-learning graduate student from the University of Maryland, she founded Korion Health and entered the 2022 Randall Family Big Idea Competition hosted by the Big Idea Center, Pitt’s hub for student innovation (part of the OIE).
They were awarded a modest $2,000 4th-place prize, but the value they received from the month-long competition and mentorship extended far beyond that. The experience of crafting her pitch and having her idea validated in the eyes of experienced entrepreneurs gave her the confidence to continue pursuing the device’s commercial potential.
Next up was a pitch competition hosted by the Product Development Managers Association (PDMA) in which she won free first place in the graduate-student category, with the award including consulting hours from local companies such as Bally Design and Lexicon Design that she said “helped me take my half-baked idea and turn it into a prototype to show to investors.”
“This was a high yield for the effort. If it’s something they can hold in their hands it really helps communicate the value proposition,” she added.
From there, things began to snowball. On the same day that she won the UpPrize Social Innovation Competition sponsored by Bank of New York in the racial equity category ($75k), she won the first place prize from the American Heart Association’s EmPOWERED to Serve Business Accelerator ($50k). The resulting publicity attracted the attention of organizers of the Hult Prize Competition, a global student startup competition that receives thousands of applicants each year, who invited her to apply.
“I didn’t know anything about the Hult Prize competition. At first, I thought it was spam,” she admitted.
She had no illusions of advancing to the finals near London, let alone winning the top prize of $1 million: until she did."
