Biography
Dana Lewis has been a passionate advocate for the idea of patient ownership of data in healthcare for more than a decade. After first building her own do-it-yourself “artificial pancreas”, she founded the #OpenAPS open source movement and leads the community to make safe and effective artificial pancreas technology available (sooner) for people with diabetes around the world. She is also spearheading the #WeAreNotWaiting movement and collaborating with people across various patient communities around the world to encourage making to solve healthcare problems in new and innovative ways. She is collaborating with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration and other government agencies to develop and implement new review processes to meet the growth of maker and other rapidly-innovating patient-driven research projects, and thereby demonstrate the safety and efficacy of new ideas and approaches far faster than can be done using traditional development and approval processes. She is also the Director, MDigitalLife for W20 Group, working at the intersection of all things health and digital, to help organizations understand, engage and activate the online health ecosystem. Dana is well known in the health care social media space, first and foremost from founding and leading the global #hcsm Twitter chat community since 2009. Before joining W2O Group, she spent years in a digital leadership role supporting a nonprofit health system and other health organizations in connecting patients with health information and services online.