The 14-week ARK Challenge for Central Arkansas concluded with Demo Day this afternoon at the Clinton Center, and the $150,000 prize went Spencer Jones’ Jones Innovative Medical Solutions. Here’s a link to our story about Jones and the six other companies competing for the startup prize.
Jones’ original name for his device was BVAD, for bifurcated venous access device. He got the idea while at the University of Arkansas:
Spencer Jones, 23, was in nursing school at the University of Arkansas when he was asked at his job to draw blood on a patient. “They had an IV site, and I said, ‘Can I stop the infusion and pull blood?’ They said no.” Jones thought that was silly. “We’ve got DaVinci [surgical] robots and we can’t create an IV site where we can pull out while pushing in?”
Judges were David Norman, a co-founder of Innovate Arkansas, which sponsors the challenge; Brad Henry of the Arkansas Development Finance Authority and James Hendren of Fund for the Arkansas’s Future.