Student Leadership Role - Apply Now! Chair of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, Sling Health STL

Sling Health STL, WashU’s student-run healthcare startup incubator, is seeking to create a culture within our program that is more inclusive and that attracts students from diverse backgrounds. To help us expand our student outreach and enrich our program, we are recruiting a passionate Diversity, Equity & Inclusion (DEI) Chair to lead and implement Sling Health STL diversity initiatives.

APPLY NOW: Applications are due Friday, February 15th at 11:59 p.m. CST.  

This is a fantastic opportunity to hone your leadership and communications skills, build relationships across organizations within and outside of WashU, and make an impact! No prior medical/healthcare or entrepreneurial experience is required.

The DEI Chair’s key responsibilities may include but will not be limited to identifying and implementing best practices/processes for diversity recruitment, retention, and training, as well as building relationships with affinity groups and appropriate stakeholder groups on- and off-campus to promote diversity for Sling Health STL.

If you have any questions or concerns regarding the DEI Chair role or the application process, please contact Aadit Shah at aadit@stl.slinghealth.org. Please forward this role to anyone you think might be interested!

We look forward to reviewing your applications!

-Sling Health STL

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ABOUT SLING HEALTH STL: 
Sling Health STL, formerly IDEA Labs, is a non-profit healthcare accelerator founded and run by WashU students that provides resources, training, and mentorship to interdisciplinary teams of students to develop and commercialize solutions to clinical problems discovered by healthcare providers. 

Sling Health STL to Host Student Biomedical Startup Pitch Competition

1/25/19

SAINT LOUIS—Interdisciplinary teams from Sling Health’s St. Louis chapter will compete in The Future of Biomedical Innovation: Startup Pitch Competition from 4:30 to 5:30 p.m. CST on January 31 at CIC@4240 – Havana Room in the Cortex District during Venture Café, a weekly networking meetup for local startups. Participating student alumni teams from 2017 and 2018 will pitch their healthcare solutions, ranging from data analytics software to apps and LED kits, and present their business plans to a panel of judges.

The first-place and second-place winning teams will be announced at the end of the event and will be awarded $5,000 and $3500, respectively. The audience will subsequently get the chance to vote for and recognize a third team. The event is open to the public and attendees are invited to mingle with Sling Health representatives and others at Venture Café afterward.

“The pitch competition is an exciting event for Sling Health,” said Kavon Javaherian, Sling Health STL president. “We are thrilled to showcase our most recent alumni teams and their innovations to the entrepreneurial community.”

The pitch competition is just one component of Sling Health STL’s nine-month experiential platform. As the founding chapter of the national Sling Health network, the organization enables students across the St. Louis area to develop skills in entrepreneurship, leadership and innovation by forming project teams and developing and implementing solutions to specific healthcare problems. Several Sling Health STL alumni project teams have become revenue-generating businesses in the St. Louis community.

The platform culminates annually in Demo Day, Sling Health’s flagship event. Throughout Demo Day, all student teams present their final innovations to entrepreneurs, clinicians and investors through poster and pitch competitions to earn financial prizes from Sling Health and jumpstart the transition to becoming fully-fledged companies. This year’s Demo Day will take place from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. CST on April 13 at CIC@4240.

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ABOUT SLING HEALTH STL: 
Sling Health STL is a non-profit healthcare accelerator founded in 2013 by WashU students that provides an entrepreneurial platform through resources, training, and mentorship to interdisciplinary teams of students to develop and commercialize solutions to clinical problems discovered by healthcare providers. For more information, please visit www.stl.slinghealth.org.

Problem Day 2018

Come to Problem Day this Friday, Sept 28, and engage with student and physician entrepreneurs who will be going through the Sling Health accelerator this year.

Location: Farrell Learning and Teaching Center (520 S Euclid Ave) - metro accessible. See this map for parking suggestions.

Itinerary:

• 5:00 – 6:00 PM – Inter-professional Networking event (2nd floor)

• 6:00 – 6:15 PM – Keynote: Dr. Michael Glamore, CEO, Laparoknot

• 6:15 – 8:00 PM – Problem Day poster presentations (1st floor)

• 8:00 – 10:00 PM – Mixer at Mandarin Lounge (free cover, 21+ only) 

Note: If you are unable to make it to Problem Day, but are interested in joining a team, don't worry! Apply to Sling Health, take a look at who the project leaders are and what problems they are interested in, then visit bit.ly/ProblemDay18 to mark which project leaders you are interested in, and we will share your contact info with them.

Project Leaders & Problems:

Saeed Arefanian, M.D.

General Surgery Research Fellow

· Interested in improving minimally invasive surgery equipment

· Improving endoscopic image orientation

Noah Basri

WUSTL medical student

· Improving equity in kidney paired donation 

Joe Beggs

WUSTL dual-degree Biomedical Engineering (from Grinnell College)

· Medication non-compliance costs the U.S. health care system an estimated $290 billion every year in avoidable expenses. Let's help patients take their medicine.

· Noninvasive recurrence screening for basal cell carcinoma

Timon Brandl & Ruskin Singh

WUSTL Business Analytics student | Data Scientist | Market Researcher

· Improving production planning, optimization, and reporting for pharmaceutical companies

Cassie Davis

WUSTL M.Eng. in Biomedical Innovation student

· Improving physician experience during colorectal surgery to improve outcomes

Khader Eskandar

WUSTL Biomedical Engineering Major, Systems Engineering Minor

·  Design a novel device to assess spatial neglect in stroke survivors to help understand the condition and develop better therapies for it.

Lea Fang

WUSTL 2nd year Occupational Therapy graduate student

· Improving the ergonomics and design of walkers/mobility devices

· Providing intuitive wheelchair control for people with various disabilities

Susan Gallagher

Distance" PhD student in Nursing | Geriatric nurse | Researcher

· Increasing oral health compliance of dementia residents in long-term care

· Improving the general oral health status of older adults with dementia in long-term and acute care hospital settings

Max Gillespie

WUSTL junior in Computer Engineering

· Decreasing malpractice in clinics through health systems improvements

Young Guang

WUSTL 3rd year Biomedical Engineering PhD candidate

· Combatting toxin buildup during organ surgeries by controlling blood flow

Mariya Gusman, M.D.

WUSTL Neuroradiology Fellow (post-graduate year 6)

· Reduce barriers to medically proven self-care for mental well-being

· Prevent fluid overload in patients with heart and/or kidney failure through wearable technology

Nedim Hodzic*

SLU junior in Mechanical Engineering

· Improving the delivery of providing chest compressions as an emergency tool 

Aakanksha Jadhav

WUSTL MBA student

· Create an application to aggregate lifestyle information from fitness trackers for health insurance companies

Cameran Jones

SLU junior in Health Sciences (pre-med)

· How can we improve the communication and delivery of health care information between family caregivers, paid-caregivers, and medical clinicians in Alzheimer’s patients?

Hataka Minami & Will Parkinson

SLU M1 | WUSTL dual degree BS in E.E. and M. Eng. in Biomedical Innovation

· Giving postural feedback about center of gravity for patients undergoing post-stroke rehabilitation therapy

Ramakrishna Pappu*

Medical device entrepreneur, innovator, and author w/ 6 years’ experience building and taking devices to market

· An accurate way to detect silent myocardial infarction to prevent irreversible cardiac damage in non-hospitalized high risk-patients

· A safer and more effective way to manage raised intracranial pressure in trauma patients to prevent coning and brainstem herniation

Brinda Perumal

WUSTL MBA student

· Providing patients with a way to carry and store health records to improve logistical efficiency and avoid test and diagnostic repetition

· Automating CPR so that anyone can perform CPR, even without training

Anju Singh

WUSTL MBA student w/ 7 years software consulting experience

· Develop application/online forum to provide depressed patients with a social outlet and volunteer counseling

· Develop application to give real time performance feedback to physicians, as is done in the consumer industry

Shaun Vaid

WUSTL MBA student  w/ 6 years experience in finance and operations, helped launch 2 startups, partner at OpComm (3rd place at 2018 Demo Day, accepted to Alchemist Accelerator in San Francisco)

· Improving communication between patients, caregivers, and clinicians in home health settings

· Enhancing emergency department workflow to improve patient volume, patient satisfaction, and revenue generated for hospital

Benjamin Wolf

WUSTL 5th year PhD student in Plant and Microbial Biosciences and co-founder of Engine 2 Photonics, LLC, a horticultural lighting company

· Making home growing easier and more affordable for urban Americans to eliminate issues with pesticides, contamination, and reduced freshness

Chi Yee*

WUSTL MBA student with market research and life sciences sales experience

· Redesigning white coats to reduce disease transmission, increase carrying capacity, and add functionality

Sean Yu

2nd Year BME PhD candidate focusing on Biomedical Informatics

·  Improved continuous patient status monitoring outside of the ICU setting

·  a patient-aware, clinical decision support tool

*Not present at Problem Day. Please reach out to these project leaders via email if you are interested in their projects

Health Systems Innovation Lab joins forces with Sling Health to tackle systemic health care issues

The BJC HealthCare/Washington University School of Medicine Health Systems Innovation Lab is joining forces with Sling Health to foster innovations in health care delivery and create new mentorship opportunities for entrepreneurial students.

Sling Health, formerly IDEA Labs, is a student-run biotechnology accelerator with the dual aim of developing student entrepreneurs and successful businesses that can revolutionize medicine.

Weaving together the innovation lab’s resources and mentorship with Sling Health’s interdisciplinary student innovators and educational program, the two organizations will provide new opportunities for students and physicians to imagine and implement innovations in health care delivery, quality and efficiency.

“While Sling Health has historically tackled problems drawn directly from clinicians, leading to exciting device and digital health innovations, this new partnership will enable student entrepreneurs to take a step farther and address larger, systemwide problems in health care delivery,” said Kavon Javaherian, Sling Health president.

The focus will be on further inspiring innovation in the lab’s key strategic areas of:

• Utilizing personalized health data to optimally inform care.
• Moving care delivery closer to where patients live, work and play.
• Harnessing community data to better support community health.
• Engaging patients in shared decision-making and longitudinal health behaviors.

The Health Systems Innovation Lab will provide Sling Health with insight and access to innovation opportunities in BJC/WUSM communities that speak to these strategic areas. Sling Health teams will use these insights to form project teams and design care delivery innovations targeting these opportunities. During Sling’s nine-month incubation cycle, the lab will afford teams targeting these problems with specialized mentorship to help them develop their ideas and companies. At the completion of the incubation cycle, promising innovations will be reviewed by the lab for further development.

“One of the greatest resources that our community has is its bright, motivated students seeking to make a positive difference in the health and health care of our patients,” said Thomas Maddox, MD, director of the Health Systems Innovation Lab and a professor of medicine at the School of Medicine. “The lab looks forward to supporting the efforts of Sling Health to harness the talents of these students to develop novel ways of delivering health care.”

A key resource Sling Health offers its teams is a window into a physician's day-to-day practice and the barriers they face to properly deliver care, said Aadit Shah, Sling Health vice president. “Through this collaboration, we hope to provide teams with not only the perspective of clinicians but that of large health care systems," Shah said.

Sling Health’s first event in fall 2018 will be Problem Day, when team formation occurs from 6-8 p.m. Sept. 28 at the Farrell Learning and Teaching Center on the Washington University Medical Campus. Contact Sling Health at info@stl.slinghealth.org for more information.