Columbia-CareOne

Pictured from left to right: Albert Go, ’22 SEAS, CEO and Co-Founder Elivio Health; Sam Botros ’22 SEAS, CTO and Co-Founder Elivio Health; Wendy Shi, ’23 SEAS, CFO and Co-Founder Elivio Health; and Patient Safety Tech Challenge Judge, Dr. Benjamin L. Ranard, MSHP, Pulmonary, Allergy, and Critical Care Medicine New York-Presbyterian Medical Hospital.

The Patient Safety Technology Challenge was excited to establish an “At-large Patient Safety Tech” prize of $10,000 as a sponsor of the Columbia-CareOne’s 2022 Healthcare Innovation Challenge. The event was part of Columbia University’s Columbia Venture Competition and open to all current Columbia University students and faculty as well as recent alumni. Select outside universities were also invited to participate. Early-stage start-ups with applications in health care were able to compete and receive feedback on and prizes for their medical innovations.

The scoring criteria of the Columbia-CareOne Challenge emphasizes empathy, meaning winning solutions have a deep and working understanding of patients’ needs. This is a critical component when considering patient safety technology. An innovation must first and foremost consider patients and their needs in order to improve patient safety on a broader level. Benjamin Ranard, MD, MSHP, a pulmonary and critical care medicine fellow and patient safety research fellow at Columbia University Irving Medical Center served as the judge for the Patient Safety Tech prize. 

The winning team, Elivio Health, is a medical device start-up who took on the Challenge to address surgical site infections (SSI). More than 2 million patients develop an SSI each year and a majority are preventable. The Elivio Health co-founders met at Columbia during a biomedical design and innovation course. Samantha Botros, Elivio CTO and Co-Founder, had previously studied medicine in South America and became passionate about medical innovation around patient safety and comfort which led her to transition into biomedical engineering at Columbia University. Botros’ aunt experienced a surgical site infection and, given her medical background, Botros became involved in her aunt’s medical journey.

The Elivio team is committed to creating a technology that can prevent this all-too-common adverse event. With Elivio Health’s technology monitoring the patient’s incision 24/7, doctors and nurses have a direct line to critical health metrics. In addition, Elivio’s Health monitoring can keep patients informed of their health metrics from the comfort of their home. We were thrilled to see their innovation utilize sensor technology, wearable devices, computer vision, and machine learning to address the problem at hand.

Botros shared that the Elivio team is “passionate about revolutionizing the post-operative healthcare system. Our goal is to provide patients peace of mind and improve clinical outcomes through the unprecedented early detection of infection following surgery.” The next step for Elivio is to test their device before moving onto clinical trials. The Patient Safety Technology Challenge is honored to invest in this promising start-up and see how they progress.