The 2025 Pathways in Health Technology is underway, empowering students from traditionally underrepresented backgrounds with the skills, mindset, network and support to thrive in medtech careers.
The 27 students in this cohort come from Bay Area community colleges with majors ranging from mechanical engineering to biochemistry and to nursing to the humanities. Two-thirds of the participants are women, and more than half are first generation college students. Three of them are exploring mid-career transitions into healthtech – an emergency medical technician, a chemistry professor, and a global sales director – hoping to apply their experience to make an impact on health equity.
“Pathways introduced me to medtech,” said Chloe Hislop, who participated in the inaugural program in 2023, while she was a student at Cañada College. Now, Hislop is in her last year at UCLA majoring in mechanical engineering and planning to pursue a career in health technology. “I was looking at manufacturing or R&D, but when I found the medtech field, I realized it would be an interesting way to bridge the gap between engineering and medicine.”
This program was such an eye-opening experience, and I feel very fortunate to have been able to be a part of it. I feel like this helped me really get my foot into health technology as someone who is majoring in bioengineering, which was something that I hadn’t been able to do in the past. I learned so much and discovered more about myself than I thought I would. I am also incredibly grateful to have met so many inspiring individuals through this program who have given me advice about my own career and encouraged me on my journey. Thank you so much for creating this opportunity because it is truly making a difference!” — 2024 Pathways student (via survey)
This is the third year DxD HealthTech has hosted the Pathways program, which takes place over 8 weekends in the winter and spring. For 2025, new resources and programmatic changes are being incorporated to enhance the impact of the experience.
“We’re committed to continuous innovation in our process both with students and companies that we work with,” explained Ingrid Ellerbe, Executive director of DxD. “We build on the program collaboratively every year, taking input from previous students and applying it as we move forward. We’re learning by doing.”
Physicians & needs statements
New this year, students are working directly with physicians from the University of California, San Francisco. Pathways students spent a day at UCSF’s Mission Bay Conference Center where seven physicians served as panelists, keynotes and mentors covering a range of different disease states from anesthesiology to heart disease and urology to pediatric cancer.
A panel discussion on global health helped students understand how innovations from the U.S. can improve accessibility and affordability of medtech offerings around the world. On the flip side, they told students about the reality of economics in innovation: whether a great idea makes it to market or not has more to do with the potential return on investment than on pure good the device might do in the world.
Online tools: Sluice.ai and Hive
Leveraging insights from the doctors, the students will develop their own “needs statement” for their group project this year – a change made in response to feedback from previous Pathways cohorts. To support students as they develop their needs statements, DxD is making SluiceAI available to the participants. SluiceAI provides resources powered by artificial intelligence to help reveal insights from data and to accelerate the students’ innovation process.
Students are also receiving access to pitch sink’s Hive, an online medtech community providing a platform for networking, collaboration, sharing knowledge, and accessing exclusive resources. Through this new platform, Pathways participants can stay engaged between sessions, and enhance their learning with Hive’s medtech podcasts and playbooks. Hive is supporting DxD by providing access to the platform for their students and alumni, so they can connect with other cohorts, access resources and view healthech internship openings. Many former Pathways students such as Hislop stay connected to each other and DxD as the years go by, attending annual conferences such as MedtechVISION and The Medtech Conference with DxD.
Mindset and soft skills
Beyond the experience of practicing addressing a healthcare challenge through medical devices, students in the Pathways program receive training on mindset, collaboration and communication that will serve them in any career they ultimately pursue. Ronald Page II, professor of mathematics at City College of San Francisco, provides empowerment sessions in a just-in-time format aligned to the Pathways curriculum. For example, before students formed their working groups, he taught about collaboration and developing team norms. Prior to the students’ presentation and feedback session, he offered a lesson on giving and receiving criticism.
“The workshops were really interesting and helpful, as they teach you how to interact with people – not only at school but in the workplace, and how to create work/life balance,” said Hislop.
Corporate mentors
A key piece of the Pathways program that continues this year: the opportunity to work with mentors from healthtech companies. Hislop worked on a team with mentors from Element Science in 2023, brainstorming ideas to improve a wearable defibrillator to protect patients from cardiac arrest.
“It was a great experience to work with a company using the newest technologies to improve a device that had not been significantly updated in the 20 years since it was first introduced,” said Hislop.
This year’s corporate mentors come from Element Science and Cala Health, which both develop lifesaving wearable technology; Pulmonx, which treats COPD and emphysema; Intuitive Surgical which offers robot-assisted surgery; and Shockwave Medical which treats blood clots with sound waves. During technology showcases over the course of the program, each company will demonstrate one or more of their innovations, and share insights to help students collaborate on a new solution for treating the health care issue at the company’s core.
Hislop’s advice to current students is to fully embrace the opportunities in the program: “Take advantage of all the connections, the speakers and company representatives, you have there in Pathways.”
To learn more about the Pathways in Health Technology program, visit: https://diversitybydoing.org/pathways-health-technology.