I slipped off my sandals to step into a worn-down building in Kilpennathur in the summer of 2024. Inside, royal blue walls, neon orange saris, and bright white dhotis illuminated the small room. Two female optometrists, not much older than me, staffed the clinic with quiet confidence. This “vision center” was one of more than a hundred satellite facilities run by Aravind Eye Hospital to reach South India’s most remote, hardest-to-access patients.
My eyes were drawn to a woman wearing a red sari and gold bangles. Her cheeks caved into her skull, and she was missing many toes. Her eyes carried a haunted expression, but she sat patiently. Through a translator, I learned she had lost her artificial eye years earlier after being violently cast out of her home. She lives outside a temple, reliant on occasional food offerings, and walked nearly three hours to the clinic. Finances, transportation, familial support, literacy — all seemed like insurmountable attainments for this woman. But now, for just 20 rupees — the equivalent of 25 cents — she could access sight-restoring care.
When I started in Penn’s Vagelos Program in Life Sciences and Management (LSM), the dual curriculum seemed at odds. How could business, often driven by efficiency, short-term performance, and top-down decisions, mesh with science and medicine, which reward patient curiosity, immense uncertainty, and bottom-up discoveries?
After one semester at Penn, I began to view this differently — to realize that scientific breakthroughs can’t have an impact if they never leave the lab. Without navigating clinical-trial funding, market incentives, or pricing and distribution, scientific and medical discoveries are never translated to reach their “end market”: the patient. So integrating science and business becomes critical. After a summer spent at Aravind, I realized the same concept applied to health-care systems.
When I learned about the Center for the Advanced Study of India’s summer internship program — a fully funded opportunity to spend the summer at an eye hospital in India — I was hooked. I hadn’t traveled much internationally, and I was eager to immerse myself in a new culture.
Immediately after stepping onto the hospital campus, I hurried to the retina clinic for an impromptu meeting with Ranitha, the head administrator and my new mentor. She explained that the clinic had low patient satisfaction, and I should figure out why. She glanced at the clock, rose, and said, “Go forth.” I walked through the clinic making observations, shadowing patients and timestamping each station advancement to deduce a flow. I collected data on cycle time, labor utilization, and takt time — metrics I had learned about in Wharton’s Introduction to Operations, Information, and Decisions class half a world away.
I soon noticed that the consultation section was a major bottleneck. Patients were waiting for hours to receive a follow-up date, which led to overcrowding. For most of the summer, I developed and implemented a triaging system: changing the location of a workstation, creating scripts in Tamil for counselors, integrating a direct retina-specific call line. Through these efforts, follow-up patients saw their wait times drop from an average of 1.7 hours to under three minutes.
This project was a light-bulb moment. While the improvements were incremental, their impact multiplied. I marveled at how Aravind itself defied every expectation of “low-resource care.” A cataract unit functioning like a well-oiled machine (each surgery taking eight minutes and costing 1.6 percent of what the U.S. spends), state-of-the-art LASIK machines, and AI-enabled diabetic retinopathy scans were evidence. Through a dual-hospital system, more than half of all services are completely free, or highly subsidized for patients in need despite significant resource constraints. I realized that business principles aren’t at odds with medicine but rather have incredible potential to improve health equity.
I returned to Penn for my sophomore year energized about Aravind’s mission to improve health-care outcomes through innovative methods of delivery. I also wanted to build.
That fall, I learned about the Y-Prize Competition, Penn’s annual student innovation challenge co-sponsored by the Mack Institute and Venture Lab. A group of friends and I began brainstorming applications for a novel reconfigurable origami metal developed in the Sung Robotics Lab. If my experiences taught me anything, it was that clear clinical need and a viable market path were necessary for startup success.
We leaned on the incredible Penn ecosystem, consulting with surgeons at Penn Medicine who commented on clinical need and integration into hospital workflows, MBA students and Wharton faculty who advised us on go-to-market and revenue potential, and engineers who helped us work through the mechanics. Soon, one application stood out: biliary stents. These small mesh tubes are placed in bile ducts to keep them open but are prone to migration and occlusion, leading to costly repeat invasive procedures. A conversation with a patient whose third stent adjustment caused him to develop sepsis, almost costing him his life, solidified our ambitions to provide bile duct cancer patients with a better solution. Stentix was born: the first biliary stent with noninvasive adjustments to correct for stent migration. After our pitch to health-care executives in January 2025, Stentix won the Y-Prize. As we continue prototyping and fundraising, we’re excited to explore the potential of our new stent.
What weaves together my LSM education, my hospital operations role at Aravind, and building Stentix is that my business knowledge, augmented by my Wharton education, can have an outsize positive impact on health-care outcomes. Scientific innovations can only be realized if market forces are considered, and operational improvements have huge impacts on the patient experience. I remain incredibly grateful for the lens that Wharton has provided, allowing me, I hope, to reach the woman in the red sari.
Amanda Madison Kossoff C27 W27 is a junior from Bethesda, Maryland, studying biology and operations, information, and decisions. She enjoys hip-hop dance, scientific research, giving campus tours, hiking, and meeting new people.
Published as “Seeing Things Differently” in the Spring/Summer 2026 issue of Wharton Magazine.
