UW Foster’s Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge Awards $38,500 To Student Healthcare Startups

A student from LegUp Prosthetics demonstrates a prototype at his team’s booth for judges during the 2026 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business, where student teams pitched healthcare innovations ranging from medical devices to AI-powered tools.

Entrepreneurship often begins with a problem or pain point. For one team of University of Washington students, it started with one of healthcare’s biggest: poor-quality chest compressions during cardiac arrest, the leading cause of death outside hospitals.

Their solution is CPRight, a real-time feedback patch that analyzes chest compressions during CPR. Designed to fit easily into the AED cabinets and first-aid kits already found in public spaces, the device provides data on compression rate and depth so bystanders can deliver higher-quality, potentially life-saving resuscitation in an emergency.

That innovation earned CPRight — a team of undergraduates and graduate students from neuroscience, medicine, computer science, and electrical and computer engineering — the $15,000 Hollomon Family Grand Prize at the 2026 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge.

Now in its 11th year, the Health Innovation Challenge (HIC) is hosted by the Buerk Center for Entrepreneurship at the UW Foster School of Business, and it showcases interdisciplinary student teams tackling some of healthcare’s most pressing problems.

The challenge is designed to push teams like CPRight beyond the big idea and into the work of building a viable product or service, says Amy Sallin, director of the Buerk Center.

“We attract a lot of students who know they want to be entrepreneurs, but we have just as many students who never even thought about that path,” she tells Poets&Quants.

“Then, when they have judges coming to them saying, ‘I love what you’re doing. You’ve got a great market, a great solution, and I know people who would invest in this,’ they begin to see this whole new world. And they want to be a part of it.”

CPRight was one of 21 teams competing Wednesday (March 4) in the challenge finals. The set-up resembles a trade show and a science fair mashup, with nearly 125 judges circulating student booths displaying research posters and working protypes. Judges — including startup founders, investors, healthcare executives, and attorneys who specialize in startup law — ask questions and offer advice on everything from intellectual property to market strategy.

Student teams line up to deliver their 60-second pitches. At the challenge, interdisciplinary groups of students from medicine, engineering, computer science, and business present their healthcare innovations to judges from the region’s startup ecosystem.

Over the past decade, the challenge has grown into one of the region’s largest student health innovation competitions. In that time, 509 teams representing more than 1,725 students from 21 universities across the Cascadia Corridor — Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Alaska, and British Columbia — have competed for more than $424,000 in non-dilutive prize money.

This year’s event followed a record 2025 competition that drew 69 teams. In 2026, 67 teams advanced to the screening round, with 22 finalists from four schools — the University of Washington, the UW Global Innovation Exchange, Seattle University, and Portland State University — pitching their ideas at Wednesday’s finals.

The competition grew out of a trend organizers noticed years ago in another Buerk event, the Dempsey Startup business plan competition. More teams from the life sciences were entering with increasingly ambitious ideas, often therapies or technologies that could take years to reach the market. But strong science alone wasn’t enough. Students needed help thinking through the business side of innovation like identifying customers, understanding markets, and figuring out how a breakthrough might actually reach patients.

“What we do through the healthcare challenge is start gently working them through those questions to help move them down that pathway,” Sallin says.

Throughout the challenge, teams work through Buerk Center programming to get them ready for the finals pitch day. This includes a digital health workshop in November, where some teams first form or start down a health‑innovation path, and a pitch workshop where students practice a 60‑second business pitch — often their first time presenting to a non‑technical audience. The center also facilitates networking, so technical teams can connect with business students, including MBAs and business undergrads, who can help them think through markets, customers, and the numbers behind their ideas. Often, teams will recruit Foster students after such meetups.

Foster MBA Nicolas Picon, team lead of TheraT, gives a 60-second presentation to judges at the start of the 2026 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge.

A big part of the challenge’s success comes from its location. University of Washington and Foster offer proximity and access to a bustling biotech and life sciences ecosystem with the kind of mentorship, and money, that can move an idea forward.

“One of the advantages of UW is being in Seattle. We are a community filled with entrepreneurs, investors, and alumni who want to give back. That’s a big part of our secret sauce,” Sallin says.

“It’s the community coming together that really makes all of this successful. It’s what helps a student go from, ‘Hey, this was a really cool capstone project,’ to five months later saying, ‘I got such great feedback, I met such great people, we’re going to launch this company. Forget the job I had lined up after graduation, we’re going to do this.’”

Several HIC challenge startups have gone on to attract funding, win major awards, or land acquisitions.

Take OneCourt, the third-place challenge winner from 2022, which built the first device allowing blind and low-vision fans to follow live sports through trackable vibrations. It has since secured partnerships with the NFL and NBA and was recently named one of Sports Business Journal’s Top 10 Sports Tech Companies. It is now partnering with Seattle FIFA World Cup 26 to debut the device’s tactile soccer broadcast during this summer’s international club competition at Lumen Field.

“As a Seattle-based startup, this will be the first time OneCourt is officially available live for Seattle fans to experience one of their home teams. Bringing our technology to the city and community that helped shape us makes this moment especially meaningful,” Founder and CEO Jared Mace said in a release about the partnership.

Mace, a 2023 graduate of UW’s Bachelor of Industrial Design, relied heavily on Buerk Center, Foster, and UW’s entrepeneurial ecosytem to launch his idea.

CarePath, a digital health platform founded by Executive MBA student Melinda Yormick, won the Best Idea in Digital Health prize in 2024. The team was later named a Sweet 16 Finalist in the 2024 Dempsey Startup Competition out of 136 participants. It has now evolved into a company called CLARA, which helps patients navigate insurance and healthcare systems using AI. CLARA was named one of Poets&Quants’ 2024 Most Disruptive Startups.

A student explains her team’s technical poster to a judge. Several startups that began in the competition have gone on to raise millions in funding or be acquired.

Older competition alumni have gone on to raise major funding or exit through acquisitions. A-Alpha Bio, which competed in 2018, has raised more than $60 million to develop protein interaction technologies. Nanodropper, a 2019 competitor, has collected more than 20 national awards for its low-cost medical device that helps deliver precise eye-drop doses. Spira, a 2020 team developing diagnostic technology, was acquired by Galileo in 2021. And mIPS Labs, a 2016 participant, was later acquired under the name Silene Biotech.

“Many of them might not feel like they’re ready when they graduate,” Sallin says. “But five to ten years later they’re ready to start something.”

HIC is often an early step in a larger pipeline of innovation programs at Buerk and Foster. Ideas that debut at HIC sometimes move on to the Environmental Innovation Challenge, which focuses on sustainability-driven ventures, or to the Dempsey Startup Competition — Foster’s long-running business plan competition.

On competition day, finalists pitch their ideas before judges fan out across the floor to question teams at their booths. One group pitched a therapy designed to remove toxins from the gut before they reach the bloodstream. Another showed how smartphone-based 3D scans could help patients fit prosthetics at home.

Even those who didn’t take home checks left with something almost as valuable – detailed feedback from investors, entrepreneurs, and healthcare leaders on how to refine their ideas and move them forward.

The winners of the 2026 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge are listed below.

Members of the CPRight team celebrate after winning the $15,000 Hollomon Family Grand Prize at the 2026 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business.

$15,000 Hollomon Family Grand Prize: CPRight, a real-time CPR feedback device that provides data on compression rate and depth to ensure bystanders perform high-quality, life-saving chest compressions during an emergency. It also won the $2,500 Naturacur Wound Healing Best Idea for a Medical Device Prize.

CPRight team members include Shubham Bansal (expected to graduate in 2026), an undergraduate neuroscience student; Deeya Sharma (2028), a grad student from the UW School of Medicine; Prisha Hemani (2028), an undergraduate in computer science and engineering; and Atharv Dixit (2026), an engineering undergraduate.

$10,000 WRF Capital Second Place Prize: TheraT, a drinkable, non-invasive therapy that removes toxins at their source in the gut before they reach the bloodstream, allowing Chronic Kidney Disease patients to lower their reliance on dialysis.

This is a Foster MBA student-led team with other teammates studying Civil and Environmental Engineering.

The TheraT team poses at its booth during the 2026 Hollomon Health Innovation Challenge at the University of Washington’s Foster School of Business. The UW team of MBA, civil engineering, and environmental engineering students aim to help chronic kidney disease patients lower their reliance on dialysis.

$5,000 Scale LLP Third Place Prize: LegUp Prosthetics which is creating a low-cost system that uses smartphone-based 3D scanning to enable accurate fitting from home, reducing costs and expanding access to prosthetic care for underserved and rural patients. It also won the $2,500 UW Population Health Initiative Best Idea for Addressing Health Access and Disparities Prize.

This is their second consecutive year competing and the team is entirely made up of engineering undergraduate students in Bioengineering, Mechanical Engineering, and Engineering.

$2,500 Mindful Therapy Group Best Idea in Digital Health Prize: ShiftSpark, a workflow-embedded support platform that helps nurses process stress in real time during a shift.

The team is comprised of graduate students from UW’s School of Public Health and a Foster MBA who participated in the Buerk Center’s Digital Health Workshop last fall and won the pitch contest.

SoundBio Lab Ignite Prize: TPT-Finder, a handheld, AI-powered surgical tool that helps surgeons instantly distinguish parathyroid tissue during thyroid surgery to prevent costly and life-altering complications.

TPT-Finder wins a six-month membership to the SoundBio Lab biomakerspace in the U-District, the first in-kind prize in the history of the competition. The team is comprised of Computer Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering undergraduate students.

$1,000 Connie Bourassa-Shaw Spark Award: ColoGuide, an AI-powered colonoscopy navigation system building its proprietary data set to automate scope insertion with real-time visual guidance. Team is comprised of graduate students in the UW School of Medicine.

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