Dr. Geetha Rao
Dr. Geetha Rao’s over 20 years of experience in high-risk technologies includes being an entrepreneur, executive and strategic advisor to numerous early-stage life sciences ventures. She is the founding CEO of Springborne Life Sciences, providing advisory services and interim management to medical device, biotechnology and other life-sciences enterprises with a focus on emerging business challenges and operational excellence that meets best-in-class, international standards. She serves as Vice President of Strategy and Risk Management at Triple Ring Technologies, a medical device incubator and contract development firm. She is an internationally recognized expert in risk management and liability and has served on several international policy making bodies, and as an invited expert to regulatory agencies, including the FDA.
Geetha chairs the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab’s Emerging Business Track for Life Sciences, serves on the Life Sciences Committee for Astia, the leading organization supporting women-founded and women-led start-ups, and has been a guest faculty on Stanford University’s Biodesign Innovation Program. She is a graduate of the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras, holds a doctorate from MIT and a masters degree from Stanford University’s Graduate School of Business, where she was a Sloan Fellow.
Serial entrepreneur, community activist, and ground-breaking, business-minded technologist Dr. Geetha Rao candidly shared her career path, from civil engineering to medical device entrepreneurship, from safety and risk management to business management and outreach. A thread of her career is centered around better serving people, patients and caregivers, through the use of technology. Over the past 15 years in the medical device industry, she has seen how technologies have better served doctors, surgeons and hospital administrators than they have providers like nurses and lay-caregivers. But innovations in medical device technologies, advancements in IT, networking and software, the rising costs of healthcare and other factors have shifted the focus from the high-investment, high-stake, treatment intensive care of the very ill to a wider, broader treatment of the less ill, with a broader impact on the overall health of a community.
But much has to be done to facilitate this happening, including the following:
Geetha mentioned the following resources which are supporting patients and caregivers in encouraging this shift toward lower-cost, more effective treatment of the masses:
PatientsLikeMe is committed to putting patients first. We do this by providing a better, more effective way for you to share your real-world health experiences in order to help yourself, other patients like you and organizations that focus on your conditions.
The smarter way to find the best treatments. Get access to millions of ratings comparing the real-world performance of treatments across 590 health conditions.
EverydayHealth.com is a leading provider of online health information. We're here to help you manage your own and your family's conditions and overall well-being through personalized advice, tools, and communities. We're committed to bringing you the most credible and relevant health information available online, and to giving you the best possible user experience. Our information is easy to understand and incorporate into your life every day.
WebMD provides valuable health information, tools for managing your health, and support to those who seek information. You can trust that our content is timely and credible.
The bottom line is that there has been a lot of movement over the last decade in enabling technology to empower patients and caregivers alike. And patients and caregivers will play a critical role in ensuring that they get continued access to technology advancements that could help in their diagnostic, treatment, and management of care for themselves and those they care for.