FastLine, a medical device company co-founded by Dr. Hilary Gallin, won the Crowd Favorite vote and was the Runner-Up prize winner at the Harvard Business School Alumni New Venture Competition in March. One hundred sixteen teams from six world regions competed in this year's alumni track competition.
"I wanted to make something we do every day less frustrating for providers and safer for patients," said Dr. Gallin, who is an assistant professor of clinical anesthesiology in the Department of Anesthesiology and holds an MBA from Harvard Business School. Together with her co-founder, Dr. Graham Lieberman, she set out to tackle the placement of central venous lines.
"We created a device called FastLine that makes the process of placing central venous lines easier and faster for clinicians and safer for patients," she said.
The device allows central venous catheters to be placed with continuous ultrasound guidance and automatically performs gold standard safety checks. Dr. Gallin explained that it turns a three-handed procedure into a process that can be performed with two hands.
"With one hand I can access the vein, I can perform manometry which is our safety check and thread a guidewire," she said. "And in the other hand I can hold the ultrasound the whole time and watch myself in real time. It's much faster because there are fewer steps in the procedure; it's much safer, because I can visualize my needle and wire the whole time; and it's a lot more ergonomic for me because of how we designed it."
The FastLine team is continuing to conduct studies and refine their prototype. Dr. Gallin expressed gratitude to the department for its support.
The New Venture Competition is an annual student and alumni competition sponsored by Harvard Business School's (HBS) Rock Center for Entrepreneurship, Social Enterprise Initiative, and HBS Alumni Relations. The Alumni Track competition is open to HBS alumni founders with early-stage ventures.