What confidence and community can do 

Alexis Dunn grew up plagued with self-doubt. Now the WSU Vancouver senior is the CEO of a digital startup company and on track to become a physician.

In the last 10 years, Dunn has been a student, a biological technician, a research assistant, a veterinary technician, a teaching assistant, a paraeducator, a certified nurse assistant, and a volunteer grief counselor and outreach worker. Any of those by itself could be a career. But for Dunn, they were all prerequisites to what she really aims to do—practice medicine.

Now a senior at WSU Vancouver, Dunn is well on the way. She will graduate in December 2023 with a biology major, a microbiology minor and extensive research experience. On top of that, she is chief executive officer of a fledgling company she founded in March 2022, Augmented Reality Integrated Health, or ARI for short—digital health software designed to bring prenatal care to the health care market.

“It took me a while to build up the confidence to take it on,” she said of pursuing her education to become a physician. “I had a lot of shortcomings growing up. I wanted to improve things, and I was drawn to research at first. I always wanted to do medical research but didn’t think I was smart enough.”

A string of successes in other endeavors finally gave her the confidence she needed. A native of Washougal, Wash., she enrolled at WSU Vancouver in 2019. After graduation comes medical school, likely on the West Coast, and continuing work to develop her company.

Conquering ill health and financial need

Now 27, Dunn started college at Oregon State University in 2014. She worked as a research assistant at OSU and as a biological technician for the U.S. Forest Service in Estacada, Ore.

Dunn experienced chronic health issues that derailed her schooling at OSU.

Still, she needed to support herself. She worked for the Washougal School District as a paraeducator, temporarily relocated to North Carolina for a similar position, providing medical assistance as well as academic assistance and working with special-needs children; and, back in Washougal, resumed working for the school district and for a veterinarian.

Dunn says she had to support herself since she was 18. “I got in with the school district and I’m still a substitute there,” she said. “I really loved it.” She went east in 2017 in part because she’d never been out of the Pacific Northwest, with an internship in Key West, Fla., and then a 10-month job in Pinehurst, N.C. “One of the things I learned there is that health care systems across the U.S. are totally different,” she said. “It opened my eyes to health care in America.” She considers Washington state one of the best places to live from a health care standpoint.

Learning from experts

Dunn is amazed and grateful for the advice she has gotten about health care and running a business from people in the know. She worked hard for it.

In spring of 2022, Dunn won a grant to participate in WSU’s I-Corps program, which is funded by the National Science Foundation and managed by the Innovation and Research Engagement Team in Pullman. They help people with technology or research backgrounds turn their product idea into something marketable. The program helps participants secure prize money, and Dunn earned $5,000 toward developing ARI. She also took part in the business plan competition and ranked in the top 20, but was not ready for a pitch to investors. She still works with I-Corp.

Dunn also took part in the University of Washington’s CoMotion program, which helps with innovation and intellectual property development. She applied for a pro bono patent through CoMotion and received it. Working with Davis Wright Tremaine law firm in Portland, she expects the patent to be published within the next year.

One problem she faced while developing the company was the competition with EPIC, the widely used health care industry software. She had to learn how to differentiate ARI from EPIC. Here, her experience with her own health issues actually proved beneficial. As a patient, Dunn had learned how to talk to doctors, and she wasn’t timid about calling them and hashing over ideas with them. She also talked to a lot of patients.

“Communication between doctors and patients is a big problem,” she said. “Maybe patients don’t understand, or are scared to speak up or embarrassed they don’t know. The solution I came up with [ARI] is an application the patient uses, which identifies potential or existing complications as well as timely interventions and management.”

The software offers a question-and-answer assessment and head-to-toe virtual examination, using smartphone cameras, augmented reality and machine learning. The application can monitor and track a patient’s health status over time, helping health care providers make well-informed decisions about their care even when in-person visits aren’t possible or convenient.

The initial application is called “Nurture Now,” and it’s an obstetric care application designed to target pregnancy-related complications, and improve maternal and fetal health outcomes.

“The reason I want to do obstetric and prenatal care is that, after talking to tons of patients, I know that one of the biggest areas where patients feel confused is when they are carrying a baby for the first time, or after giving birth for the first time. There’s a lot of stigma, and it can be scary to ask for help. With this application, I want to reduce anxiety for patients. I want them to feel heard and safe,” said Dunn.

Feeling gratitude

Dunn is doing her preceptorship with the Vancouver Clinic, which she praises highly. She even earned certified nursing assistant credentials to qualify for work there. She is collaborating with the clinic on her health care research while launching the beta application in 2024.

A longtime volunteer, Dunn now donates her energy to biotech organizations, including the Oregon Bioscience Association and Nucleate, a student-led organization that represents a global community of bio-innovators like herself.

She attributes a lot of the confidence-building she needed to the WSU Vancouver community and her husband and fellow WSU Vancouver student, Blake Dunn (who works with her on the business side of ARI).

She is grateful to WSU Vancouver for changing her life. For one thing, she received scholarships that gave her the financial freedom to pursue her education, including the Glen D. and Katherine Sinclair Endowed Scholarship (two years in a row), the Leona M. Metzger Scholarship for Students in Medicine, the Florence and George Handy Endowed Scholarship in Sciences, the Liberty Bell Science Scholarship and a Washington Opportunity Scholarship.

In a letter of thanks to the College of Arts and Sciences, Dunn wrote, “I believe that the support I have received from the WSU community has allowed me to accomplish goals I would not have been able to accomplish without it!”