Second-year PharmD students are faced with a unique challenge in Associate Professor of Clinical and Administrative Sciences Armen Simonian’s Introduction to Pharmacy Informatics course –– pitch an innovative pharmacy technology to five judges in a Shark Tank-like competition.
The 11th annual Shark Tank Meets Hackathon App Competition caps a semester-long project for the students, who are broken up into teams of four or five and tasked with coming up with ways to fill a gap to make the patients and/or pharmacists lives better and more efficient.
“This is a real-life type of event, and they really get a taste of what it’s like to be an entrepreneur and go out there to pitch a product, develop a product and do all the finances,” said Simonian. “These students get a good taste of what it’s like to start from scratch and turn it in to something that might be a business. For the School of Pharmacy, this is something unique.”
The six teams took turns presenting their product to the judges — Richard Cale, PharmD ’21, global product marketing manager at BD; Jonathan Chan, owner of ABC Pharmacy; Chris Folayan, founder and CEO of OCFX INC; Brian Garner, owner of Hendricks Pharmacy; and Dev Mazumdar, CEO of PacketBio. Many of the teams focused their projects on further implementation of artificial intelligence in the pharmacy space.
"Helping the students through this event has been inspirational,” said Folayan. “It was great to see all the phenomenal ideas and out of the box thinking that came from them, and I can truly say that the future is great in the pharmaceutical world because of innovations and inventions that are coming out of students like these.”
“I’m so grateful to these entrepreneurs, they are so successful in their own right –– they've started companies, they’ve sold companies, they’ve had an incredible amount of accomplishment in the business world,” said Simonian. “For them to carve out some time to come here to KGI and help us with this project, it’s amazing to me. I’m humbled every year these very successful and very busy people find the time to come here.”
Team CONSULTATION RX won the competition with an AI-centered project meant to improve connectivity between patient and pharmacist.
For all the students involved, it was an opportunity to advocate for change in the field they will soon join as professionals.
“I think it brought us out of our box just to be innovative and come up with an idea that would be beneficial to patients, to pharmacists, and to help the whole process with prescription use,” said Beatriz Serrano, PharmD ’28.
“It was insightful to look at all the products out there and how we could possibility improve on it,” said John Ayad, PharmD ’28. “It’s really insightful to work with the team and know all the possible things we could do.”