Kristin Raffaelle, is a creative strategist, artist, author, prior athlete, and lifelong learner. She has been a leader at the center of innovation and disruptive technologies for 30 years. She has been fortunate to collaborate with ‘sector greats’ in cultivating pivotal solutions within Biotech, Telecom, Application Development, Healthcare IT sectors, and Athletics. 

As a nonconformist thinker, her actions are not constrained by legacy systems or the complexity of existing realities. Her playground is the incredible nature of human experience combined with the business of emergent technologies. As an artist who paints, writes and speaks from the depth of her soul; her passion is unleashing collaborative creativity for the good of mankind.

Wisdom in Athletics

As a youth and young adult, she was a high performing competitive athlete in tennis and alpine skiing.  Kristin experienced firsthand, the value that coaching wisdom has on building solid life foundations. Now, she is energized by human potential and vast elegant complexities of our advancing civilization. Kristin kicked off her professional career in 1991, after graduating from Arizona State University in the College of Engineering and Technology.  

Wisdom in Biotechnology and Applied Science

By perhaps sheer luck, she found herself working for, and around the brightest business and scientific minds in the emerging biotech sector: ISC, Mars Incorporated, Genentech, Hoffman, Merck, Pfizer, and Amgen. There she was confronted with a series of complex challenges associated with growing a business at the forefront of revolutionary thinking.  In this endeavor, the challenge was maintaining narrow temperature control for highly sensitive and costly biologics, from the point of manufacturing throughout distribution.  She applied the nature of thermodynamics to identify and build processes that were critical to drug efficacy.

During this tenure, she faced a monumental, historic challenge: securing the nation’s blood supply from HIV/AIDs and other blood-borne diseases.  This massive disruption allowed her to directly collaborate with leading scientific teams at American Red Cross in Maryland and United Blood Services in Arizona: Those efforts defined processes and solutions that became the U.S. standard of blood collection and distribution worldwide. After eight years in the BioTech related industry, she resigned her role as the Vice President of Sales and Business Development at ISC, Inc.

Communications as our Oldest Technology

Directly following, Kristin entered another vast tech ocean: Telecommunications, Wireless/Wireline/IP, at Lucent Technologies as a Senior Product Manager and then as the Director of Global Product Marketing, she found herself collaborating with creative business and engineering minds from Bell Labs, Telecom Providers, Sun Microsystems, KPMG, Logitech, Microsoft and emerging sector innovators such as Skype, Broadsoft, Juniper Networks, and Logitech. It was there that she learned the elegant and expansive nature of large-scale systematic thinking, and the importance of language cultivation and use. 

To her benefit and hopefully that of mankind; she engaged directly with the creators: engineering fellows and business innovators, who brought to life fiber optics, high-speed access, wireless/wireline technologies, ‘the cloud’ and the application development explosion. Her team’s focused on understanding the technology, defining its potential worldwide value, and producing proliferation strategies and tactics, while fostering new ventures for the next wave “IP technology” and the indefinitely coming “Application Explosion”.

All engaged in the sector were apart of informing our present reality: voice, video and data integration; intelligent databases/networks and Artificial Intelligence (AI) – enterprise and consumer. She remains energized about tech’s potential as she sees the wave of application development and use scenarios informing and performing, for the betterment of the world and all its constituent parts.

Healthcare Information Technology; Moving Closer to End-user Value

Kristin’s desire to observe the direct benefit of technology in practice, propelled her next career move towards advancing healthcare. Again, she found herself at the forefront of innovation tethered with complex systems and constrained by government and enterprise legacies.

She joined GE Healthcare for several years, then aligned with a midsize HealthCare IT company for another three years and then led a Non-Profit for the State of Arizona. Generally, all efforts were directed to increase quality of care through data-driven health, while driving down costs via Health IT.

In roles of Vice President of Marketing and as CEO, she defined and supported strategies and tactics that enabled technology use-standards, and informed healthcare legislation within a more Patient-Centered model and Health Information Exchange. In these efforts, her focus was on extending technology to bring about more available, accessible, and cost-effective quality care.

During this pioneering work, it became abundantly clear that evolving large, complex  legacy systems was challenging, yet doable. Furthermore, it demanded informed, systems level thinking that included a view of the totality. Similar to work in the telecommunication’s sector, it was evident that an iterative approach that gracefully bridges legacy systems to the “new environment” is a critical reality. And finally, she saw how one’s own health information, from labs to health records of all forms, is a powerful Human Currency that will drive revolutionary solutions to our most fundamental needs, such as vaccines and therapeutics.