From the time I peered through the nursery room window watching my mother, a neonatal ICU nurse, take care of premature babies, my life has been devoted to improving health. My journey has taken several forms since then: cardiac nurse, pediatric nurse, medical researcher, federal health grants program founder and director, national health policy wonk, data scientist, research data infrastructure developer, and now, new entrepreneur. I‘ve chuckled many times at young graduates when they ask me how I got to where I am today…I had a theme, no doubt, but I could never have predicted the pathway. I remain committed to improving health outcomes by promoting the efficient, effective and secure mobilization of health data and to advance health research and care continuity.
Richard Stearns, (the) president of World Vision, an over $2 billion-dollar faith-based humanitarian aid, development, and advocacy organization, recently gave a talk that inspired me. Instead of taking the opportunity to pull heart strings with the myriad of un-met basic human needs across the world, he delivered a powerful and positive message of the great forward strides global relief efforts have made to eliminate extreme poverty. There is certainly much work to do, but often with simple non-sexy solutions like a water wells and hygiene education, you can save hundreds of thousands of lives. Often the hardest hurdle to bringing about change isn’t the creation of the solution itself, but building awareness, consensus, and adoption of potential solutions.
I hope to bring a similar message of positivity and inspiration to work together and push to “keep-on-keeping-on” for our efforts in creating health technology that can save lives. I believe my role here, in this blog, is to help with the awareness piece by highlighting exciting large-scale, national efforts that can be leveraged to bring new products to market that allow people to achieve their optimal health. To be successful as a company and as a fellow warrior against death and disease is to understand the end user for whom you are creating – people like yourselves. People don’t live to buy health technology. People want health technology so they can live longer and fuller lives, making and sharing memories with the people they love. I hope the awareness I raise allows you as a health tech entrepreneur, like myself, to preserve precious R&D funds and leverage what already has traction. To scale more easily and effectively from your first client to your 100th client and beyond. Most of all, I hope that this approach enables you to create more highly integrated health tech solutions that work seamlessly in the background of every individual’s health story.
