Inaugural Houston Methodist & Ion Reverse Pitch Competition

Written by Michelle Stansbury

When Houston Methodist Center for Innovation built our Tech Hub at Ion Houston , one of the main goals was to tap into the diverse Houston community to discover novel solutions to health care’s challenges.? In the fall of 2024, we put out a call to the Houston innovation community in search of engineers, students, start-ups, developers and community members to join us for our inaugural reverse pitch event.? We garnered interest from 175 registrants and had over 80 people in attendance at our information session with representatives from across all industries and backgrounds.?

Reverse Pitch Problem Statement

Houston Methodist requires all employees to participate in its tuberculosis (TB) surveillance program, which includes initial and annual screening for TB. Although the TST (Tuberculin Skin Test) has lower direct costs, it requires employees to return to the employee health clinic to have the test read 48-72 hours after placement. If the employee does not show up during this time window, the test needs to be repeated, potentially leading to further delays and workplace inefficiencies.

Dr. Robert Meyer , System Director of Employee Health and Occupational Medicine at Houston Methodist, presented our problem statement to attendees during the information session. We determined that if a digital solution could be developed to accurately authenticate employees and read their TST results remotely, we could save significant time and costs while not needing to reinvent the entire TB surveillance program.???

A group of expert judges and mentors evaluated 11 competitive abstracts that were submitted from the information session participants. While novel technology and market fit were essential, we also examined the capability of the team and viability of the proposed solution to determine if a prototype could realistically be created within our short 6-week window.? Ultimately, we chose two teams to move forward to the finals which would take place at the annual Pumps & Pipes event.

The two final teams demonstrated incredible grit, persistence and hard work in presenting their solutions to a packed audience.? Each team came up with vastly different solutions to the problem statement, and our judging circle spent extensive time with both teams to better understand their proposal.? We ultimately awarded first place to NLTIX Edge and second place to TSTain (pictured below).? We were extremely impressed with the quality of effort these teams invested and look forward to incorporating the innovation into our current TB surveillance program at Houston Methodist.? With the success of this initial pilot, we intend to replicate the reverse pitch model with a new problem statement year after year.??

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