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CHERYL SENTER
Rethinking Access to Health Care
To watch the team’s video entry for the competition, go to www.exeter.edu/bulletinextras.
E X O N I A N I N N O VAT O R S E A R N S TAT E W I D E R E C O G N I T I O N Connie Cai ’17, Gillian Chu ’16, Vinjai Vale ’18, Divya Bade ’17 and Abhijay Bhatnagar ’17 (pictured left to right) all contributed to the writing of this story. Editor’s Note: In November, a team of five Exeter students competed in the final round of the Social Venture Innovation Challenge (SVIC) at the University of New Hampshire, a competition designed “to identify pressing social and/or environmental issues at the state, national or global level, and then find an innovative business-oriented approach to solving them.” The team earned honorable mention for its project, RAD (Rural Area Diagnostics) Health, which would bring online medical kiosks to rural areas facing a shortage of primary care physicians, in order to improve health care outcomes and efficiency. The Exonians, along with a second student team from PEA, competed in the “community” category, as the “student” category was open only to University System of New Hampshire undergraduate and graduate students. They were the only two high school groups in the competition and the
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RAD project was one of just 16 finalists. Below, the student finalists provide first-person accounts of their project’s development and reflect on what it was like to compete against teams of college students and professionals.
THE GERM OF AN IDEA
Vinjai approached each of us individually, asking us if we wanted to form a team for the challenge, which Mrs. [Liz] Reyes [the community service coordinator for the Exeter Social Service Organization] had emailed us about just a few days before. At our initial meetings, each of us suggested various ideas we wanted to pursue, ranging from providing better elderly support services to raising concussion awareness at secondary schools. Over the course of a few days, we realized that many of our proposals were tied to health care. Eventually, it became clear
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