Healthcare is intensely personal. Even when national statistics show improvement—which has been the case for most countries over recent decades—what matters is whether my baby in rural Uganda is having trouble breathing or whether my aging father in New York who went into the hospital with a broken hip will now die from the MERS he contracted there or whether why my wife in Buenos Aries can access the drugs she needs to survive cancer.

In our hi-tech age, it seems like much of what ails us and our loved ones should be erasable using innovative technology.

Dr. Kristian Olson agrees. He’s an American internist and pediatrician, based at Harvard, who practices globally, as well as a designer who helped create the Center for Affordable Medical Technology. CAMTech designs solutions—high-tech and not-so-high-tech—that produce better, affordable health outcomes.

Dr. Olson is also a winner of the 2024 Tällberg-SNF-Eliasson Global Leadership Prize recognized by the jury for his unwavering commitment to transforming healthcare especially in low and middle-income countries through human-centered design, pioneering solutions that improve lives across diverse communities.

Tell us what you think: Can smart use of technology make us—all of us—healthier?

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ABOUT OUR GUEST
Kristian Olson is an Internist and Pediatrician and serves as Vice President of Design Impact at Mass General Brigham Health where he leads the Springboard Studio. He is a founding member of the Core Educator Faculty and the Chief Innovation Officer in the Department of Medicine’s Residency Program at the Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH). He founded and is the Director of the Consortium for Affordable Medical Technologies (CAMTech) through the MGH Center for Global Health and is an Associate Professor at Harvard Medical School. He has worked extensively in low-and-middle-income countries as well as the US to develop innovative solutions to healthcare challenges utilizing design-thinking. He champions humility, empathy, and creative confidence amongst would-be innovators. Kris is a serial innovator, has several patents and has started both non-profit and for-profit ventures to accelerate ideas to implementation.

Originally from rural Canada, he completed a degree in biology at the University of British Columbia, medical school at Vanderbilt University and his residency training in the Harvard Combined Medicine and Pediatrics Program. He obtained a Masters of Public Health at the University of Sydney while a US Fulbright Scholar and a Diploma in Tropical Medicine at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.