Patient Safety Fellowship Alumna, Anna Li, Wins $1M Social Entrepreneurship Prize

Korion Health, a startup founded by Patient Safety Fellowship alumna Anna Li, has won the prestigious $1 million Hult Prize for 2024.

The startup, developed in collaboration with Carnegie Mellon University, focuses on using artificial intelligence to create health screening tools that empower patients to monitor their own health from home. Korion Health's goal is to improve healthcare access, particularly for those in underserved communities, by making diagnostic tools more affordable and accessible outside of traditional clinical settings.

The win came after competing in the global final in London, where the Hult Prize recognizes startups for social entrepreneurship and impact. Li was joined in London by Akshaya Anand, a University of Maryland computer science and microbiology graduate, who serves as the company's CTO.

Li noted the award funding would dramatically accelerate Korion’s efforts to gain approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

In 2023, Li participated in the Jewish Healthcare Foundation's Patient Safety Fellowship which prepares participants to apply innovative methods and strategies in safety science, team-based problem-solving, systems thinking, and quality improvement for healthcare settings. Fellows get the opportunity to take a fresh look at promising patient safety solutions from some of the best local and national thought leaders in health care and weigh their merits.

“The Patient Safety Fellowship really exposed me to the way of thinking that health care occurs in the home, not in the clinic, because people spend most of their time at home, and how it’s critical to meet people where they are and engineer systems that account for and prevent human error,” Li said. “That’s exactly what we’re doing with Korion.”

Li is an MD and PhD student at the University of Pittsburgh and Carnegie Mellon University with clinical and research focuses on emergency medicine and computational biology, respectively.