Korion Health: Combating Heart Disease Through DIY Screenings
Akshaya Anand is a Master’s student in the Machine Learning program at the University of Maryland and is part of Startup Shell’s Spring 2023 Batch! She has a passion for applying technology in innovative ways to improve healthcare. When she's not making an impact in the healthcare space, Akshaya enjoys salsa dancing, hiking, ice skating, and martial arts.
What are you working on?
We are building an electronic stethoscope that enables people to get DIY heart and lung screenings at home. The MVP is done, and we are currently raising funding and working to get FDA approval for our product!
How did you come up with the idea for this startup?
Korion Health was born out of a shared desire in 2022 to make healthcare screenings more accessible and to empower patients. Anna Li, my co-founder and an MD/PhD student, noticed that the number of deaths due to heart disease was increasing due to the lack of accessible screening options during the pandemic.
She realized that innovative technology could be used to make heart and lung screenings more accessible to everyone.
Heart disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, and regular screenings could prevent many of these fatalities. However, several barriers, such as cost, time, and distrust in the medical system, prevent people from getting regular screenings. We believe that making heart screenings easily accessible from home is the solution to this problem. By catching heart diseases earlier, patients can manage their conditions better and avoid ending up in the ER. This solution benefits everyone involved: patients can save time and have better health outcomes, providers can save time and access more patient data, and insurance companies can save money through outpatient monitoring and improved outcomes.
They are currently raising for their seed round through Honeycomb, a crowdsourcing campaign, for the next 53 days. Their goal is to raise $250K, and they’ve been able to raise $20K in the first 2 days! Read more about the company, product, and team below if you are interested, and feel free to contribute below!
Can you give us a quick rundown of how the product works?
Our product is simple yet innovative: a USB-electronic stethoscope and a web application. The user connects the stethoscope to a laptop and begins a heart screening on our web application.
Our GUI shows a live mirror-image video that’s augmented with a circle to indicate where the user should place the stethoscope. Our computer vision techniques track the stethoscope as it moves towards the target heart location.
Once the user places the stethoscope in the correct heart location we collect the heart recording and update the interface to show the next heart location. Our stethoscope has a blinking light on it, allowing patients to use the device under their shirts and remain fully clothed while conducting the screening.
Additionally, our product can record lung sounds, making it critical in addressing respiratory diseases - another leading cause of death worldwide.
Can you tell us about your team?
As much as I love our product, I think our team is equally impressive, passionate, dedicated, and wholesome.
Anna Li is our CEO. She is currently an MD/PhD student at Pitt/CMU and has lots of experience in the clinic and is a great patient advocate. I met her at the Pittsburgh Hackathon through a mutual friend and we easily became friends.
Andrew Nguyen is our CFO. He has a strong background in healthcare apps and financials. We actually both did research in the same lab at NIH. Andrew has a great sense of good aesthetic photography, and makes yummy matcha lattes!
Dr. Eric Dueweke is our primary advisor. He is the Director of the Care Innovation for the Heart and Vascular Institute and an attending cardiologist at UPMC. Dr. Dueweke is also one of our biggest advocates and source of clinical support throughout our process.
What have you accomplished over the last year?
Our team has developed an MVP, which consists of a 3D printed USB stethoscope and a GUI to identify 4 heart locations and track stethoscope movement. We've also submitted our full omnibus patent to protect our MVP as well as future plans for ML-based diagnostics and educational tools.
In addition, we've completed 5 accelerators/incubators and built out our business model.
We're proud to have received a letter of Intent for 50,000 stethoscopes from a mid-sized telemedicine company and have won several pitch competitions, including first place at the Johns Hopkins Healthcare Design Competition this spring.
To get our product market-ready, we've partnered with a manufacturer, an electrical design firm, an industrial designer, and FDA consultants. With these steps, we are hoping to bring it to market as soon as possible.
What’s next?
We have plans to add even more features in the future. For instance, we want to develop machine learning based diagnostic information to provide immediate feedback to patients following their screening results. We also plan to work on providing personalized educational tools, empowering patients to better understand their health. In the long run, we plan to expand our model to other devices, such as an otoscope and ophthalmoscope.
To make this happen, we have a clear roadmap to FDA approval and our first customers, but we need to raise $1M in seed funding.
We're hoping to flip the incentive structure of healthcare by engaging the community and allowing the general population - our ultimate customers - to contribute and share in our future success through crowdfunding.