Leadership role involves influencing group activities and coping with change. Healthcare leadership is often associated with improvements in patient care or organizational outcomes applied in the healthcare industry. A healthcare leader must adopt a suitable approach for handling conflict at all stages to create a positive outcome for all. It emphasizes in establishing the leadership role that facilitates effective and efficient healthcare provision. Alertgy provides the world’s first real-time wearable non- invasive continuous glucose monitor and alert system. Marc Rippen is Alertgys President and Founder. He is a visionary leader, highly skilled engineer, scientists, technical sales and marketing professional with a proven track record in product development, program management and sales related to the application of high technology to solve what people thought were impossible problems.
With over 30 years of experience, Marc has worked for multiple fortune 500 companies, Department of Defense (DOD), NASA, SOCOM, and DARPA commercializing dozens of ground-breaking and revolutionary technologies. He holds various degrees across multiple interrelated disciplines including Microbiological Sciences and Immunology, Biophysics, Analytical Chemistry, Masters of Aeronautical Science, Management of Engineering and Technology. These skills have allowed him to support the transition of technology from the lab into startup businesses, and then to publicly traded corporations.
Transformational Leader
Marc began to learn leadership skills as a teenager, first as an explorer scout, then as a volunteer in a program called Amigo’s De Las America’s where he was trained to administer vaccinations to small children and then actually did that for thousands of children when he applied his hiking skills in reaching them in remote plantations in the Highlands of Guatemala in the summer of 1974. From there he joined ROTC in college and was trained to be an officer in the United States Army. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant in 1978. He trained and served initially as an Armor Officer and later in Special Forces, Combat Engineers and finally as a Technical Project Officer. In his civilian profession as a materials engineer at United Technologies Corporation, he quickly advanced into program management. Over several decades he directed advanced applied research and development programs for the NASA, the Airforce, Army, DARPA, Navy, and SOCOM. In his last position, he was the Director of Engineering for SRI’s Marine and Space Technology Group.
Difficulties and its Effective Strategies
The biggest challenge is that in the United States, everything is driven by short term goals. This makes it difficult for public corporations to compete globally as they can not use long term strategies effectively. They are judged by analysts who are focused on short term analytics, and that can devalue a company’s worth overnight based upon their opinion. Marc thinks that companies are more able to compete if they are privately held by investors that can think in terms of long-term strategic goals. He also thinks that many U.S. companies do not have enough technologists/engineers in high enough levels, this combined with their aversion to risk hurts the ability of companies to take advantage of applying emerging technologies before they become obvious to the competition.
Ethical and Diversified offerings
Alertgy uses social media, focus groups, pilot studies, and other outreach techniques to diversify its offering to create an appeal in-front of its target audiences. Marc would like to sponsor applied research programs to further applications for the company’s technology at Universities. He sees himself running a technology skunkworks and mentoring young engineers & scientists to apply their knowledge and research and development skills to address all the technical challenges that exist in the medical, energy, food and environment that can benefit mankind as a whole while building strong technology-based industries in the United States.
Solution-Oriented Vision
Marc thinks every leader must be driven by a vision to provide a solution that benefits their customers better than any other existing solution. He constantly invests his time in attending industrial and technological trade shows/conferences, reading technical literature, and learning new things every day. He also is an adjunct professor of Aeronautical Science at Embry Riddle Aeronautical University and finds that in teaching one has to learn the most to be properly prepared for class and in answering the many great questions that students give you.
Improving Health through Innovation
Alertgy saves the lives of diabetic patients, by dramatically improving their quality of life, increasing their lifespan and by easing the burden to their loved ones and caretakers mostly by providing the world’s first real-time wearable non-invasive continuous glucose monitor and alert system. The company was founded by a small team of innovators who have collaborated on challenging technical programs over the years. Marc founded the company as a result of saving his wife from entering a diabetic coma in 2016. It was then he realized the existing unmet need for this technology to measure blood sugar levels with an external wearable sensor device. He put together an “A-Team” of professionals whom he has worked with over the last decades in taking technical laboratory concepts to proof of principal demonstrations and scaling to global commercialization in several industries. Ironically Marc saved his own life using his first prototype which when he tested it indicated that he was a hyperglycemic type 2 diabetic, with a blood sugar reading of 650 mg/dl (>150 is bad). His a1c was 12.8 (>7 is bad). Over 9 million people in America are unaware that they are diabetic and only find out when they are hospitalized as the disease progresses.
