Basit Chaudhry, MD
As a medical student, Dr. Basit Chaudhry became certain that before a better, more humane healthcare system could be built, a technological problem needed to be solved: a way for healthcare providers to discover and deal with all the information required to provide optimal care. Dr. Chaudhry went on to get his Ph.D. in health services research and informatics and later became a medical technologist at IBM. Most recently, Dr. Chaudhry founded Tuple Health, which offers technology and services to medical providers, payers, and purchasers. Tuple is a step toward solving the problem of organizing what we know about medicine and making it freely available to those people who need it. Technology alone can’t solve the problems in healthcare, but Dr. Chaudhry believes that technological innovation can help us develop a system focused more on wellness than treating illness.
Sophie Houser
The summer before their senior year of high school, Sophie Houser and Andy Gonzales created the video game Tampon Run as their final project for a coding summer intensive with Girls Who Code, an organization trying to close the gender gap in technology and encourage girls to discover the creativity and power of coding. Tampon Run, a simple game that uses humor and satire to combat the societal taboo around menstruation, went viral when Houser shared it with friends on a simple website in September 2014. Houser and Gonzales have been written up all over the world, given a TEDx talk, won a Webby People’s Voice award, and a Tribeca Disruptive Innovators Award. Sophie, a native New Yorker, graduated from Bard High School Early College last spring and has just started her freshman year at Brown University.
Stephen Keating
Steven Keating is a doctoral candidate at the MIT Media Lab who is developing novel platforms for 3D printing, synthetic biological fabrication, and designed growth of the next generation of products. Curiosity drives his research and also saved his life through the accidental discovery of a baseball-sized, cancerous brain tumor found in a voluntary academic scan. In recent months, Keating has become a vocal advocate for an open-access health system that gives patients the right to see and share their own medical information with providers, supporters, and researchers. “It’s the power of knowing what’s happening to you,” he says.“ We have Google Maps to help us get to the grocery store, but for cancer, there’s no direction. We follow whatever our doctors tell us.”
Michael Samuelson
Michael Samuelson is an author and an expert on leadership, health and wellness, patient experience, health policy, and disease prevention. Practicing what he preaches, he is an avid world trekker who has logged high-altitude mountain adventures in Asia, Europe, Africa, South America, and the US — all after the age of 50, and after being diagnosed with cancer. Health is not an end in itself, he says, but merely a vehicle for what brings meaning to our lives. Similarly, staying healthy can never be about metrics for weight, blood pressure, or cholesterol. Such abstract indicators fail to provide the answer to a simple question: How are we doing in life, really?
