Alexandra Drane
Eliza Corporation's Founder & President
Alexandra Drane has devoted her career to inspiring people to lead healthier, happier and more engaged lives through the use of innovative technology. Her entrepreneurial spirit and passion for technology and design have led to the launch of four successful healthcare ventures over the past 15 years. Alexandra has proven herself an innovator, whose ideas on using technology to engage people in their health – and her belief in adding a touch of joy to the often staid world of healthcare communications – have been adopted by the nation’s top healthcare organizations.
Alexandra is also a co-founder of Engage with Grace, a not-for-profit movement launched in October 2008 aimed at helping people understand, communicate and have honored their end-of-life wishes. She received the Boston Business Journal’s “Champions of Healthcare” award for her efforts in this area, and in 2009 Engage With Grace was one of the top ten phrases added to the healthcare lexicon.
Prior to founding Eliza, Alexandra was a founder of three other healthcare ventures – all focused on developing products that enable individual behavior change through the use of technology. The output of these ventures included the web-enabled injury-tracking software system adopted by the US Olympic Committee, software that automates dialysis clinics across the U.S., and a medical device proven in clinical trials to improve asthma treatment compliance by over 35%.
Alexandra sits on the board of Eliza as well as the Foundation Board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston, Mass. She is on the Germaine Lawrence Board of Advocates, New England’s leading provider of residential treatment services for adolescent girls, and also serves on the board of two other technology startups focused on using innovative technology in their respective fields. Alexandra is also a member of the Health Executive Leadership Network, Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation, and is a trustee of several charitable trusts.
Define coherence in your terms...
Coherence to me means better aligning our healthcare “needs” (such as sticking to an exercise routine, keeping up with preventive screenings, staying on our meds) with the things on which we seem to want to spend more energy and attention and budget (bacon double cheeseburgers, cable tv, plastic surgery).
For example, there’s the upwards of $70 per person the tobacco, alcohol, and food industry use to ply their wares, in a stunning suffocation of the comparative 33 cents invested by healthcare organizations… What are you more likely to pay attention to?
Padma Lakshmi (or some other beauty) devouring a bacon double cheeseburger – or the shiny pamphlet which just showed up in your mail that showcases a diseased kidney and the headline: ‘Join our Diabetes Disease Management Program! We’re here for you!’ Obviously, a lot more people would rather Padma was there for them.
Healthcare’s deeply engrained culture doesn’t always help either. Its focus on formal, double-blind, placebo-controlled studies and peer-reviewed journal articles full of “you should’s” and “therefore’s” can limit applicability and impact in the real world.
Click the picture to visit Alex's company website
Sidenote: ENGAGE WITH GRACE a side project Elixa has initiated that's focused on the importance of end-of-life conversations. It’s inspired by a personal experience of Alex’s (there is a video of her story on the site) and all we are asking is that people donate a minute or two of their conference, or their presentation, to share what we are calling The One Slide – 5 questions that should get us all thinking about those icky but super important end-of-life wishes. Take a moment to click on the picture below & read over those questions. Then share them with your circle.
Alexandra Drane, ELIZACORPORATION.COM
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2010 CoCo Message Board
