Sep 11, 2019
Dustin Plantholt’s “Life’s Tough - You Can Be Tougher” podcast this week features Kristen Valdes, Founder & CEO of icanbwell.com. Kristen shares her story of her entrepreneurial journey and what shaped and influenced her to create b.well.
Founder and CEO Kristen Valdes has spent her entire career focused on providing quality healthcare to underserved populations in our country. When Kristen experienced the healthcare system as a consumer, she quickly realized that she hadn’t accomplished nearly enough.
Her middle child Bailey suffers from a significant autoimmune disorder. Even as a healthcare “expert,” it took Kristen seven years to advocate for her daughter to get an appropriate diagnosis. Together, they experienced countless misdiagnoses, costly repeat procedures, and diagnoses based on limited and siloed health data.
In fact, Kristen was the only person able to successfully pinpoint her daughter’s medical issue by aggregating, analyzing, and considering all pieces of her daughter’s health data. Specialists continuously brushed off Kristen’s suggested diagnosis until one day, her daughter was hospitalized with a life-threatening complication from a medication contraindicated to that specific disease.
After countless conversations with other individuals and caregivers, Kristen understood her case was not an outlier, but in fact, the norm. People need navigation and personalization through the overly complex and fragmented healthcare system to become successful advocates for themselves and their loved ones.
Kristen launched b.well, named after her daughter Bailey or “B,” to empower consumers to become advocates through access and understanding of their holistic health data. b.well is transforming healthcare into a simple, on-demand experience by putting consumers in the center of the healthcare equation.