Health Care Challenge Accepted: The Kairos Society Summit

New York’s 5^th annual Kairos Society Summit brought together a selection of top student entrepreneurs across the globe to discuss solutions to the world’s biggest problems including challenges in health care.

This year’s Kairos Summit featured the Johnson & Johnson Mobile Health challenge, which aimed to prove that mHealth initiatives launched in a university environment can be very successful given access to mentoring and resources.

This experience was not just for the benefit of the students. CEOs of the largest companies in the world, such as Richard Fuld, the former Chief Executive Officer of Lehman Brothers, came both to celebrate students’ approach toward making a dent in the planet’s problems and to learn from them at the same time.

Ankur Jain, Kairos Society founder, summarized the collaborative mission of the event like this: “This annual summit brings together the brightest and smartest student entrepreneurs and most influential leaders globally, to discuss and find solutions for the biggest problems in the word.”

The premise of J&J’s idea challenge on mHealth was that if you fill a room with 350 of the brightest student-entrepreneurs from top universities worldwide and challenge them to come up with solutions to solve the biggest healthcare problems through technology, you can expect extraordinary results.

The challenge asked students to come up with disruptive concepts around specific topics, like the management of diabetes and cancer. For instance, one group came up with a non-invasive temperature measurement patch for cancer patients in chemotherapy. This patch would warn and alert patients about potential infections before they cause any harm.

Health 2.0 New York chapter founder and Medstartr CEO Alex Fair’s take on the conference was this: “Kairos is a fantastic showcase of new ideas and the break out sessions were a superb way for the established leaders in the space to work with the racing new minds being applied to some of the oldest problems of humanity.”

Every year, the Kairos Society features a startup program called Kairos 50s, saluting a global selection of the most influential and most innovative student-founded entrepreneurship ventures.

This year’s Kairos 50s selection was showcased on the New York Stock Exchange trading floor, thanks to Kairos mentor Duncan Niederauer, NYSE CEO. Nearly 20% of these companies are health related, including US based Advocates for World Health, Mana Health, MIRA Rehab, Nanoly Bioscience, and many more.

ABCLocal covered an exclusive story on this year’s Kairos Society Summit, Here