Whether it’s a prototyping kit part of tomorrow’s doctor’s bag, or a MakerHealth Space laboratory dreaming up a prototype prescription, our global team is on a mission to democratize the skills and tools to create and invent the things you can hold in your hand. These are the things that heal. And the things that our team is making sure you can make. We’re MakerHealth and you are a health maker.
Using tools, a mindset, and an engaged community, we build the health making capabilities of these people and institutions so that everyone can create healthcare technology. MakerHealth is a company dedicated to amplifying the creativity of these health makers.
MakerHealth wants you to make tomorrow’s health technology. Since 2008, our academic roots at the MIT’s Little Devices Lab has taken our founders from the jungles of Ecuador, to coffee farm clinics in Nicaragua, to the sleepless hospitals of London and New York City to make medical invention tools that everyone can use to launch their own ideas.
Originally part of an approach to reinvent the way MIT students were taught medical device design, our founders soon found an impact opportunity to train front line staff to go from providers to prototypers. Our DIY medical technology research gave way to stealth nurses in Central America-–quiet everyday medical makers saving patients lives. Would we find them in America? Supported by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, we created the MakerNurse project as a research study to understand medical making in America. Today, MakerNurse continues as part of the MakerHealth portfolio with creative nurses spanning hospitals across America and around the world.
We believe everyone can be a medical maker. In a world where health care technology is increasingly black boxed, and unaffordable, we found a stealth community of innovators working around the clock to make health better, by making their own devices to make us better. These are the health makers, the tinkerers and the explorers that inspire our team to create instruments, to rewrite medical education, and the build the invention infrastructure in hospitals around the world
Anna Young
CEO and Co-Founder
Medical Device Archeologist, TEDMED Speaker, Fast Company Most Creative Business People, MIT Lecturer
Principal Engineer Graduated from MIT with Mechanical Engineer and Product Design degree. Favorite prototype ever made: a manual steering system for power wheelchairs.
Co-Founder TED Fellow, MIT Faculty, Director Little Devices Lab Favorite prototype ever made: a manual nebulizer