How Immigrant Journeys Shape a Better World

My daughter was walking out of the pharmacy in Iceland a few months back when one of her best friends grabbed the medication she just received:

Best Friend: I’m almost positive the medication they just gave you has penicillin in it.

Daughter: We specifically told them that I was allergic to penicillin, so we should be okay.

Best Friend: I don’t think they understood us.

She was right—they hadn’t understood them. The drug in her hand contained penicillin and my daughter’s seventeen-year-old friend had just averted a significant medication error during their school trip to Reykjavík.

The complexity of the situation was real.

My American daughter, who lives in Austria, was at a pharmacy in Iceland trying to manage an ear infection that had spiraled out of control. She was accompanied by her Kenyan-Austrian friend, who speaks German and English. Between them and the Icelandic pharmacist, three first languages were in play, each layered with accents, urgency, and the stress of an acute health care episode.

We will always be grateful that her friend—who is deservedly heading to medical school next year—marched right back into that pharmacy and made sure my daughter received the correct prescription.

But even with the right medication in hand, the ordeal wasn’t over. When she returned home to Salzburg a few days later, it was clear that the ear infection hadn’t responded to the medicine.

She was admitted to the hospital and placed on an antibiotic drip for six days.

As a teenager, she was old enough to be admitted as an adult, which meant sharing a room with three to six other patients at a time. My wife and I could only see her during visiting hours. And once again, the language barrier loomed large. We’re still at an intermediate stage of German, and the daily misunderstandings with doctors and nurses were disorienting.

Don’t get me wrong—the hospital in Salzburg was excellent, and the care providers were skilled and attentive. But the experience underscored how even in a world-class system, communication gaps can leave patients and families feeling unmoored.

Fortunately, by the end of the week, our daughter had made a full recovery.

Linh Pham was born and raised in Vietnam and moved to the United States on her own at age 18. An only child of a single mother, she has spent many years apart from her family, who remain in Vietnam.

Here in the U.S., Linh has stayed closely connected with the Vietnamese community and sees firsthand how language barriers affect daily life—especially since nearly one in two Vietnamese residents report speaking English less than well.

When Linh was paired with Siddharth Ur and later Daniel Rodriguez on a graduate school project in Harvard’s Master in Design Engineering program, they quickly recognized how the complexities of language had shaped each of their lives—growing up in Vietnam, India, and Spain respectively.

And they shared a conviction that this was a problem worth solving.

They began with a broad focus on the challenges older immigrants face in the United States—isolation, transportation, technology. This wasn’t an abstract design exercise. Linh, for example, often thought about her own mother—still in Vietnam, but one day planning to retire in the U.S.—and how difficult it might be for her to navigate a new life in a second language.

But again and again, as they spoke with different communities and tested ideas, they found themselves returning to the same baseline problem: health care. It was the place where language barriers carried the most immediate risks—misunderstood symptoms, missed medications, and delayed treatments.

Without clear communication between patients and providers, every other challenge only grew larger.

It was in that realization that Lexi began to take shape.

I first met Linh, Siddharth, and Daniel last year when they cross-registered from the School of Engineering into Innovating in Health Care, the course I co-teach at Harvard Business School alongside the legendary Regina Herzlinger.

Regi, who immigrated from Israel to New York when she was eight years old, is the first woman to become a tenured professor at Harvard Business School and is widely known as the godmother of healthcare innovation. For decades she’s been encouraging students—Linh, Siddharth, Daniel, me, and generations before us—to turn ideas into ventures that improve patient care and societal health. Many of her alumni have gone on to create companies that have dramatically improved the patient experience and, collectively, are valued at well over a billion dollars.

It was in that classroom that Linh, Siddharth, and Daniel began to refine what would become Lexi, an AI-enabled platform designed to eliminate language barriers in medicine. They brought together a team of multilingual immigrants from across five Harvard schools and MIT, blending expertise in business, law, public health, design, and technology.

From the start, their guiding conviction was simple: no patient should be left unheard.

Rather than bolting translation onto healthcare as an afterthought, Lexi embeds real-time text, chat, and voice support directly into the clinical workflow. That means doctors and nurses can remain fully focused on patients, while communication unfolds naturally across a dozen languages.

Watch: Linh and Siddharth Present Lexi at the 2025 New Venture Competition

I remember my jaw dropping last spring when the Lexi team shared some big news: their work had been recognized on a global stage and at the highest level. Out of more than 11,000 submissions worldwide, Lexi was selected as one of only 75 projects to receive the prestigious iF Gold Design Award—an honor that was first initiated in 1953 and is typically reserved for industry giants like Apple and Ferrari.

To put this in perspective, Lexi was the only student-led initiative recognized for this award, standing shoulder-to-shoulder with some of the most iconic products of the year: the Apple iPhone 16, IBM’s Quantum System Two, Ferrari’s 12Cilindri sports car, and Sony’s PlayStation 5 Pro.

See: Linh accepting the iF Gold Design Award

The Lexi team has created a professional-grade innovation with the potential to change healthcare worldwide, and they are only just getting started.

“I imagine my mom retiring here one day and struggling to advocate for herself in the U.S. health system. That’s why I’m building a future where families like mine can seek care with dignity and agency.”

— Linh Pham

Their journey is a good reminder that many of the most powerful ideas begin with something personal. Linh, Siddharth, and Daniel created one of the most inspiring entrepreneurial teams I’ve ever met, and I’m confident that they are going to make health care safer for all of us.

Creating. Meaning. Everywhere.

Thanks for reading about Linh, Siddharth, Daniel, and the Lexi team.

This fall I’m teaching in Boston and traveling around the world to meet with people who are creating meaningful change in their communities.

About 3–4 times a month, I’ll share reflections on what I’m learning—stories from the road, insights from my work with entrepreneurs and leaders, and thoughts on how we create meaning through what we build.

If that resonates, I’d love for you to follow along.