Vaccinations are a reality when you travel or relocate to a new country. Losing track of vaccination records costs time and money, plus the need to brave the needle once again.
A new startup business by UC Davis undergraduate students seeks to fill that gap. DOZEY is an online platform that saves people time and money by making verified vaccine records accessible from anywhere in the world.
“With everything being accessible on your phone, as global mobility increases vaccine records should also be accessible,” said Aashreeti Deo, co-founder of DOZEY and undergraduate economics major at UC Davis.
DOZEY has already digitized 54 vaccination records, saving its clients over 100 hours and $8,200 in re-vaccination-related costs. This early momentum is the result of the founders’ drive to make their solution a reality as well as support from the entrepreneurship community at UC Davis.
The UC Davis entrepreneurship ecosystem
Deo always knew she wanted to be an entrepreneur. However, when she came to UC Davis last fall, she didn’t know where to start.
She started taking classes in entrepreneurship in the College of Engineering. Along with her classes in economics, she began to build the knowledge she would need to launch a product.
In January, she partnered with Isaac Karottu, majoring in human biology, and Raghav Kedia, majoring in computer science and economics, to launch DOZEY. Their goal was to build a product that would keep people from needless re-vaccinations, particularly for people who travel or relocate to new countries.
They built DOZEY from the ground up to be completely secure and transparent. It’s HIPAA compliant, meaning that it follows federal requirements to keep clients’ medical records private. The website uses 256-bit encryption, just like banking websites, and every time a record is accessed, the system logs a timestamp.
Over the past year, Deo has gotten much more involved in the UC Davis entrepreneurship community, which she said was part of what attracted her here in the first place. She is now the student manager at the Student Startup Center, where she manages outreach. She is also working toward earning the Student Startup Center Certificate of Entrepreneurship.
She is a board member of OWN IT, a UC Davis women’s leadership conference and festival designed to foster and encourage young women and non-binary individuals to pursue their ambitions.
“The startup community is heavily growing here at UC Davis,” she said. “I think a lot of people don't know about it, and when I tell them, they get heavily involved and they see what it's actually like.”
What’s next for DOZEY and digital health records
The team recently pitched DOZEY at the nationals for the Hult Prize. It’s the world’s largest student competition with a top prize of $1 million in funding for ideas that solve pressing social issues.
This was the first year UC Davis hosted a Hult Prize regional qualifier, which Deo and her co-founders won. In the national competition, they went up against teams of graduate students, some with over a decade of professional work experience. They didn’t advance, but they learned a lot in the process.
“The networking aspect of it was also amazing, because we met so many people who were just as driven as us,” said Deo.
The team is continuing to expand DOZEY while applying for more business accelerator programs and funding opportunities. Right now, they charge no fees for the service, but this may change when they finish building their proprietary large language model as an AI component that manages the system’s technical side.
Their effort to build the product has so far been largely self-funded, but the team has also been part of the National Science Foundation I-Corps program, which offers training and support for STEM-based business ideas. They have interviewed with private clinics and doctors’ offices and found interest in DOZEY’s potential.
Deo said that the most important thing for early career entrepreneurs like her is to truly believe in your idea, which means working on it every day.
“Even if it's five to 10 minutes, you have to work on it,” she said. “You have to visualize what you want the project to be. If you can visualize it, you can make it a reality.”
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