Sanketh Andhavarapu
Title: Co-founder and Chief Product Officer, Vitalize
Age: 21
Ellicott City native Sanketh Andhavarapu and Veeraj Shah founded Vitalize, a digital wellness platform for health care workers, right as the Covid-19 pandemic hit in March 2020. The next two years proved the importance of their work as frontline workers struggled with increased workloads and stress as the pandemic ramped up.
Andhavarapu is not only a founder of a medical company but a health care worker himself. His clinical experience gives him a unique insight into what causes health care professionals to burn out, and how burnout can lead to worse patient outcomes.
The company works with health care providers by offering guided meditations, peer support and other tools to help stressed-out medical staff.
Since being nominated for an Inno award by our sister publication, the Washington Business Journal, in 2020, Andhavarapu has continued to grow the business through fellowships, investments and other avenues.
What inspired you to try to improve the quality of health care in the United States?
For the longest time, I aspired to be a patient caregiver, a passion reinforced by a variety of research and clinical experiences. I worked in a variety of clinical environments throughout high school and college, either as a volunteer or medical assistant. During these experiences, I had the opportunity to be there for patients at their most vulnerable times. During these experiences, I also recognized that there was more to health care beyond the patient-physician relationship. I recognized how technologies, clinical research, policy guidelines and more have the potential to shape the quality of care that patients receive, at scale. With these patients in mind, I wanted to play a larger role in transforming health care.
Along with your work as an entrepreneur, you’ve also racked up nearly 1,000 hours in clinical settings. How does that experience help you come up with new ideas for innovations? Why is mental health a focus for you?
My clinical experiences show me the gaps in health care and fuel my entrepreneurial and research interests. Vitalize is a perfect example of this. During my clinical experiences, I’ve always looked up to the clinicians that were around me. However, it was also these experiences that exposed me to the high rates of professional burnout in health care, including among some of my own mentors. Curious to learn more about burnout in health care, I did some reading and learned how clinician burnout increases the likelihood of implicit biases and medical errors during patient care. Especially with Covid-19 and the rising rates of clinician burnout, I was determined to find a sustainable and scalable solution for improving clinician well-being.
Our health care system is only as good as those within it, and the mental health of our clinicians directly affects the quality of care that patients receive. To this end, I co-founded Vitalize to improve the mental health of clinicians. I've also conducted research on the prevalence of PTSD (post-traumatic stress disorder) among health care workers and associated factors during the Covid-19 pandemic.
You previously earned an Inno Under 25 award from our sister publication, the Washington Business Journal, in 2020. How has your career changed since then?
Over the last two years I’ve grown so much as an entrepreneur. I’ve developed a much stronger understanding of the digital health landscape, and the role that I want to play in pushing health care innovation forward. Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to participate in two venture capital fellowships, an entrepreneurial internship with a health-tech startup and conduct research on clinician well-being and clinical decision-making. These experiences ultimately positioned me to be more knowledgeable about running a health care startup, and have inspired confidence in myself to continue growing Vitalize.
What are the next steps for Vitalize as a business?
We just accepted our first venture capital investment, and also are in the process of signing our first annual contract with a health system. These are very exciting milestones for the business. In the upcoming year, we hope to secure additional contracts with health care organizations, and further iterate upon our product as we continue to collect user feedback. We also hope to secure an academic partnership that would allow us to collect stronger metrics around the efficacy of our solution.
Since this article was published Vitalize has brought on two new investors.
To read about the rest of our Inno Under 25 class, click here.
