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Social entrepreneurs often find themselves in the spaces in-between what already exists. Case in point is Kate Michi Ettinger, a bioethicist by training, a researcher & design strategist by profession, and a serial social entrepreneur by practice. She is weaving her expertise and passion in an area called integrity by design (you can see her TEDxBarcelonaChange talk below).

Her current project is called OpenQRS, which creates open source community development tools focused on assuring the quality, reliability, and safety of health care devices. Her work spans the space in-between need for low-cost medical devices and government regulations for those devices.
In her interview, she shares more about how she is working to not only build tools to enable affordable medical devices and appropriate standards but also to educate and collaborate with government and regulatory bodies to make her vision possible.

Meet Kate

Kate Michi EttingerKate holds a BA from Johns Hopkins, holds a J.D. and has been pursued certifications in mediation, bioethics, facilitation, and client counseling. She has taught at UCSF and has spoken at the University of Bangkok, the World Congress on Medical Law in Croatia, and International Conference on Clinical Ethics Consultation, Amsterdam.

Kate co-founded startup Planet-Well in 2000 and held a product development role at ePatients. Kate went on to found the Mural Institute, where she engages with foundations and other clients on topics of interaction design, healthcare ethics, and digital strategy.

Listen to the Interview

Watch Kate’s TED Talk

 

It’s not often that a speaker at an event shares live feed of their EKG. But then, the VLAB panel discussion titled “The Future of Diagnostics: Consumer Driven Medicine” was not an ordinary look at the field of medicine. The event–which was held at the Munger Center of the Paul Brest Hall of Stanford Law School–took place on Thursday, April 16th 2013.As part of illustrating emerging technologies in mobile health, moderator Dr. Kraft pulled up an app he regularly uses which tracks key health indicators. From his iPhone to the big screen, he shared real-time data such as heart rate and EKG.

Consumer driven diagnostics: emerging and disruptive

The event was a fascinating look into the possibility and scope that emerging technologies such as mobile phone apps, bluetooth technology, and mobile scanning have altered the way we track and understand our health. The burgeoning field of consumer driven medicine has already grounded costs of once-expensive processes such as DNA sequencing. As you may note from the NIH graph, the cost of sequencing a human genome used to be upwards of $10K in the early 2000’s, today costs a fraction of that sticker price. Industry leaders, such as Dr. Kraft, cited predictions that the cost of sequencing a human genome will one day cost in the range of $100-200.

The multi-level disruption of healthcare and diagnostics was the focus of this panel. It featured the following speakers:

Moderator, Daniel Kraft, M.D., Executive Director, FutureMed, Faculty Chair of Medicine, Singularity University
Panelist, Walter De Brouwer, CEO of SCANADUPanelist, Dr. David Albert, Founder and Chief Medical Officer at AliveCorPanelist, Anne DeGheest, HealthTech Capital, Managing Director and Founder

 

Watch the video

View the entire panel discussion in the following video:

 


What social entrepreneurs should consider

One aspect of consumer driven diagnostics is the technology + medicine aspect. i.e. How do you code for diagnostic medicine? A select sector of the entrepreneurial and social entrepreneurial communities will focus on this side of the rubics cube. This means understanding the science, the web development, and compliance landscape (i.e. “HIPAA”, etc.) of developing medicine-related technology.

However, there is another incredibly vital angle that will require impact innovation attention. It is the distribution, scaling, and effective analysis of crowdsourced medical data. Consumer driven diagnostics is as much a data problem as well as a medical-technology problem. If you aren’t building the consumer-facing software, you might consider creating efficient processes by which data collection becomes scalable, increasing amounts of data are accurately analyzed, and methods are developed for keeping this potentially-impactful data secure and private.

If you step back from the niche area of medicine + technology you arrive to a broader place of making sense of, efficiently using, and securely tracking big data. That is a problem that could benefit from the nuanced, triple-bottom line mindset of a social innovator.

Photos from the event

Here are a few photos from the event include images of the brochure, the networking hour that takes place directly before the panel, a view of a slide featuring the panel members, and a shot of dynamic moderator Dr. Kraft as he presented his engaging introduction.
VLAB panel on consumer driven health (#VLAVcdmed)
networking hour before fo

VLAB panel on consumer driven health (#VLAVcdmed)

VLAB panel on consumer driven health (#VLAVcdmed)

VLAB panel on consumer driven health (#VLAVcdmed)

VLAB panel on consumer driven health (#VLAVcdmed)