At this case competition in Ann Arbor, Michigan, the winning team sought to better connect people with IACCs and healthcare providers who serve them.
Last Friday, business school students participated in the first-ever case competition focused on Long COVID and infection-associated chronic conditions (IACCs). In the event, hosted at the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business in Ann Arbor and founded by a student with Long COVID, the competitors shared proposals to improve healthcare for people with IACCs.
Case competitions are a common practice at business schools, giving students opportunities to practice the role of a consultant who must quickly get up to speed on a company’s or industry’s challenges and propose solutions. Last week’s IACC-focused event highlighted increasing interest from entrepreneurs and investors in these complex diseases and educated up-and-coming MBA students about them.
Ross MBA student Armani Guerra was driven to start the case competition by his own experience with Long COVID, which he described in an op-ed for The Sick Times last month. About a dozen of his classmates helped organize the event; it featured leading clinicians and researchers as well as people with IACCs from the Michigan school and far afield.
“Infection-associated chronic conditions are more prevalent now than ever before, and there is a vast market emerging of disruptive technologies tackling these problems,” said Ibrahim Rashid, who co-founded the Long COVID tech start-up Strong Haulers and now works at the Sorenson Impact Foundation, in his keynote speech.
Out of 27 student teams who applied to the competition, from the University of Michigan and nine other schools, Guerra and his colleagues chose seven to present full proposals. The teams’ pitches sought to address common challenges for people with IACCs, such as the long time it can take to receive a correct diagnosis, getting bounced around from specialist to specialist, and facing providers who aren’t educated about Long COVID and related diseases.
The winners, Team Ross Wolverines — awarded a $5,000 prize — proposed an electronic health platform for both health providers and people with IACCs to communicate with one another. They cited the Body Politic Slack server, a popular Long COVID support group that shut down in 2023, as a key example of the demand for this type of communication option.
Jane Kim, a member of the winning team, has been affected by Long COVID herself, she told The Sick Times. She recalled going to a Long COVID specialist in New York City earlier in the pandemic: “There were no real treatment plans … I felt really discouraged,” she said. “The fact that I could do something about it [by participating in the competition] gave me a sense of agency.”
Winning team proposes a platform for connection
Guerra and his colleagues started organizing the case competition a year ago. The event was funded entirely through sponsorships by healthcare and IACC-related companies such as RTHM, the Open Medicine Foundation, and Intermountain Health.
Competitor teams had about one month to apply to participate, between September 5 and October 7. The application asked for students’ resumes and included an open-ended question: “Why do you want to participate?”
Guerra and his colleagues used the answers to that question to select seven four-person teams to present at the competition. They looked for students who were “empathetic, mission-driven, wanting to make an impact,” he said. “We especially paid attention to folks who said that they had family members or friends who were connected to this.”
One team, called Team Nova, even highlighted that direct connection in their presentation by sharing a video in which a close relative of one of the team members described her own harrowing journey to a Long COVID diagnosis.
Once chosen, the teams had about three weeks to review materials from the competition organizers and put together a proposal. The prompt asked competitors to choose one company in the healthcare industry and develop a business proposal for how that company might serve people with IACCs.
We especially paid attention to folks who said that they had family members or friends who were connected to this.
Armani Guerra, on selecting teams to compete
Team Ross Wolverines developed their top-prize idea for Epic, a software company that serves thousands of hospitals in the U.S. and likely already includes millions of people with IACCs among its users. They proposed that Epic develop a bespoke patient portal and provider portal for IACCs: the patient portal would help people with similar symptoms and diagnoses find and support each other, while the provider portal would enable better communication among clinicians.
“We really wanted to have community, patient-centered and provider-centered solutions,” said team member Abigail Alpern Fisch. The group also looked for a proposal that could be used right away, rather than waiting on biomarkers research or results from clinical trials, explained team member Xander Rodriguez.
Team Ross Wolverines won the competition’s top prize, $5,000. Two teams tied for second, and each won $2,500; one, called Team Strategy Squad, proposed a data platform that would pull in information from different sources and make it easier for patients to find the right specialists, while the other, called Team reMission, proposed a managed care plan within a large insurer that would offer Long COVID-specific services.
Past case competitions have led to companies taking on competitors’ ideas, Guerra said. He hopes the IACC competition can have similar longer-term success.
Attendees learn about IACCs, but without masks
The case competition organizers took some steps to make the event accessible to a wide range of people, including a virtual attendance option for those outside Ann Arbor. They also had wheelchairs on hand for in-person attendees and a quiet room available for anyone with energy-limiting symptoms to rest during the event, Guerra said, and they selected an event space where the ventilation system was recently upgraded. (This reporter’s CO2 monitor showed readings in the range of 600 to 800 parts per million.)
While the organizers made KN95s available, they did not require high-quality masks, and most in-person attendees did not wear them — including many of the event’s speakers. This lack of masking garnered criticism from some IACC community members watching or learning about the event online.
Masking at Long COVID–related events has been a frequent topic of social media discussion in recent months, as community members suggest that it’s difficult to take a speaker’s words about the disease’s dangers seriously if they are not protecting themselves and others with a respirator.
Guerra acknowledged this criticism in an interview, stating that he understands where people who prioritize protective measures above all else are coming from. He said a mask mandate would have been difficult to enforce for him and his colleagues as student organizers.
Guerra also chose not to mask at the event himself, despite knowing that SARS-CoV-2 reinfection could be dangerous for him and despite masking in other places in his daily life, because he saw the potential results of the event outweighing the personal risks. “The mask, for a lot of people, is a barrier, even though it shouldn’t be,” he said. “And so for me, I take a very calculated risk on when I mask, when I don’t mask, because I want to create impact for our patient population.”
In this case, part of that impact is educating top business school students about IACCs, when they are about to enter a world that is incredibly unfamiliar with those chronic illnesses. Many of the students competing “are going to top-tier institutions” after they complete their MBA programs, he said, including pharmaceutical and consulting companies.
“And so we just created 29 advocates who have this in the back of their head, and if an opportunity comes up, there’s a possibility they’ll drive an initiative,” he said.
Indeed, members of the winning team all said they felt inspired to continue advocating for people with IACCs. While the competition element is “fun and exciting,” they realized that this work has real implications for people’s lives, Rodriguez said. Coming out of the event, he added, “We’ve got this knowledge now, that we have a duty to share and assist as we can.”
We’ve got this knowledge now, that we have a duty to share and assist as we can.
Xander Rodriguez, member of the winning team
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