A growing innovation ecosystem at Harvard Chan School is helping students develop and launch public health and social impact startups.
September 25, 2024 – When Fiza Shaukat, MPH ’22, arrived at Harvard Chan School, she was determined to fix a stubborn problem in the health care system in her home country of Pakistan. The country does not have an electronic medical records system, which means doctors write everything on paper, and it’s up to patients to keep track of it all. Shaukat grew up seeing her elders taken to the hospital with paper records that were easily lost.
“What can I do to solve this problem?” wondered Shaukat. After studying biomedical engineering in the U.S. and working in management consulting, she decided to take action. First, she co-founded Patient First.AI, a startup that created a smart health card that works kind of like a bank card, connecting patients in developing countries to a system that stores, analyzes, and monitors their medical records. Second, she enrolled at Harvard Chan School to gain expertise in health management and secure faculty input to help her refine and scale her venture.
Before starting at the School, Shaukat returned to Pakistan to launch her startup. She built a team, tapped into local networks, and developed the first version of her app, which garnered 3,000 patient users. Then she hit a roadblock. Local physicians would use the digital platform briefly, then drop it. She needed to find out why so she could come up with a solution.
On campus, Shaukat linked up with Rick Siegrist, a senior lecturer on health care management and director of innovation and entrepreneurship. Through course work and an independent study over three semesters, Shaukat worked with him to map the best path forward. She interviewed physicians and learned that they were dropping the technology primarily because they would have to change their current workflow and take longer to see each patient. Her solution? A smart pen and notebook that doctors can use as if writing on paper, while the data is digitized. In 2023, Patient First.AI, which by then had more than 15,000 patients on the app, earned first place in its category and $75,000 in the Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, an annual competition presented by Harvard Innovation Labs (i-Lab).
“You have to find the right opportunity, stay motivated, and draw on the strategic resources at Harvard Chan School,” says Shaukat now. “The world needs more startup founders out of public health. I know many students with strong ideas and a desire to be involved in entrepreneurship. Let’s pull them in.”
“I was emboldened to see my opportunity to lead”
Interested students have a number of options, including two courses on innovation and entrepreneurship in health care led by Siegrist and one on innovation and global health systems led by Rifat Atun, professor of global health systems. Atun also directs the Health Systems Innovation (HSI) Lab, which runs an annual hackathon focused on developing solutions to health challenges. Across Harvard, students with venture ideas can join i-Lab, or apply to Harvard HealthLab Accelerators (H2A), co-founded by Harvard Chan School and Harvard College with a focus on social impact ventures. There’s also the Public Health Innovation and Technology Student Forum (PHIT), one of the School’s largest-student-run organizations.
Students are seeing that public health challenges, such as climate change and health inequities, demand timely, agile, and impactful solutions, says Siegrist, also faculty adviser to PHIT. “Now, just about every public health student you run across has thought about maybe being an entrepreneur. They want to solve problems—they have a mindset where they want to innovate and effect change.”
In his courses, Siegrist, a graduate of Harvard Business School, invites entrepreneurs to his classes to share knowledge and experience. Students develop their own ventures around a public health topic, moving through key steps such as developing a value proposition and a business model.
One student influenced by Siegrist was Moka Lantum, MHCM ’13, a physician, pharmacologist, and tech entrepreneur. “To make a bold move and decide to start a company, you need an enabling environment. At Harvard Chan School I was emboldened to see my opportunity to lead,” he says.
Lantum heads CheckUps, an award-winning entity that improves health care access in Africa by enabling health financing and nurse dispatch services on demand through WhatsApp.He said that when he arrived at Harvard Chan School, he aimed to simply advance a corporate career. Then he met Siegrist.
“I didn’t plan on starting a company. Then you come across somebody like Rick who has done it multiple times. And you say, ‘Okay, if he can do it five times, let me try once,’” says Lantum, referring to Siegrist’s experience founding multiple startups focused on health care solutions.
Making ideas from the classroom actionable is vital in today’s world, says Lantum. “My parents went to school to get a job with government. My generation went to school to get a job with corporate. Now when you get a Harvard degree, you should be ready to start your own company. You need to know what it takes to build solutions to real problems.”
Building a global community of founders
Atun, a faculty member at Harvard Chan School since 2013, is also praised as an inspirational mentor by former students now leading successful startups. For instance, Aral Surmeli, MPH ’19, says Atun’s health systems innovation course inspired him to develop a more global presence for the startup he founded with Harvard Chan School classmates. HERA Digital Health is an open-source mobile health platform that focuses on bringing reproductive and vaccination health care services to refugee women and children in Turkey.
“There is a huge need for innovations and for developing the capacity within our community to think in different ways and come up with new solutions to public health challenges,” Atun says. “More of the same is clearly not addressing the needs.” He says public health is stellar at defining and quantifying problems but less so at generating solutions that can be implemented practically. As a result, many challenges remain unsolved.
Atun’s course, Innovation and Global Health Systems, teaches students to understand venture ideas within the context of health systems. “Too often, courses focus on the great technology that can solve a problem without understanding what it takes to introduce something into health systems, which is why so few innovations are taken up at scale,” he says.
It’s a problem Atun knows well. As an entrepreneur, investor, and leader on the executive team of the Global Fund, he chaired the panel making investment decisions totaling $5 billion a year across 120 countries. “There was no shortage of funding, but it was so difficult to get innovations into health systems and scale them up,” he says. “When I came to Harvard, I set out to design a course that would help students make their solutions work in practice and at scale.”
Atun also set out to go beyond teaching and create a community of founders who can make things happen globally, through the HSI Lab, which hosted its most recent hackathon in April simultaneously in seven countries. From among 1,200 applications, 50 teams from more than 30 countries were chosen to develop ideas that use AI to tackle three major public health problems: cardiovascular disease and diabetes, cancer, and mental health. Twenty of those teams were chosen to attend an online bootcamp to refine their presentations before pitching to a global judging panel. Four winning teams were then selected for four weeks of intensive incubation, receiving training on every aspect of venture formation. After that, the HSI Lab put them in contact with potential funders and invited them to join its growing venture alumni network.
Opportunities and resources
Beth Ann Lopez, MPH ’18, says that Harvard Chan School’s innovation ecosystem, along with resources from Harvard Business School, inspired her to launch into the health startup space. After graduation, she co-founded Docosan, a comprehensive health care service marketplace based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. It was named a technology pioneer by the World Economic Forum in 2022 and now has more than five million users. Lopez is now working on a new startup, Outfox Health, an AI copilot for health navigation that makes health systems easier for people to understand and access. “I am pursuing my mission to help people access health care while doing work that is fun, cutting-edge, and creative. I’m getting to work with awesome people and build something that matters for a better society,” she says.
Ian Speers, MPH ’23, a former president of the PHIT student group, co-founded medical device company Pacto Medical while at the School. He said that opportunities like H2A, with its emphasis on bringing problem solvers together across disciplines, and the i-Lab, which supports startups from across Harvard’s 13 schools, have helped students like him with backgrounds in social and behavioral sciences create valuable connections. “By drawing in the right co-founder or team members with additional technical or financial expertise, an idea can turn into a strong social enterprise,” he says.
Indeed, Pacto Medical earned an Ingenuity Award at the 2023 Harvard President’s Innovation Challenge, the same year Shaukat earned first place in her category. Now Speers is in the Harvard Climate Entrepreneurs Circle at i-Lab and has hired a full-time employee and filed a patent. Shaukat is also working with i-Lab, tapping its resources to move her startup forward.
H2A complements the i-Lab, but differs in a few key ways. In addition to its tight focus on public health and social impact solutions, the program accepts just 10 teams from across Harvard into its annual cohort. These teams receive individualized coaching and mentoring and the opportunity to present to a board of high-level executives. Overall, the emphasis is on investing in students rather than specific venture ideas.
As the program enters its third year, Lumas Helaire, an assistant dean at Harvard Chan School and one of H2A’s founding advisers, is taking stock of this approach. He’s developing methods to capture the impact of H2A on its students and alumni, such as through surveys that measure the longevity of their commitment to making social impact. “We care about the long-term success of our entrepreneurs,” he says. “We care about their current ventures, but we care more about equipping them with the kind of deep support and resources they need to dig in and build healthier, stronger, and more sustainable societies.”
Illustrations: Paddy Mills