High altitude doctor trains amateurs for Everest
Jack Kreindler is cofounder of the Centre for Health and Human Performance. His career spans 20 years of business, information technology, emergency medicine and high altitude physiology. He will be speaking at Wired Health on 29 April.
Wired.co.uk: You seem to be a bit of a polymath, working in a variety of areas
Jack Kreindler: I wouldn’t describe myself as a polymath. Jack of all trades is probably a better way to describe me.
What are the key projects you’re involved with?
One of the key things is the Centre for Health and Human Performance (CHHP) in London. That is essentially the home of the top sports scientists, sports medics and forward thinking specialists in the UK. We manage complex cases by utilising the skills of sports science and a lot of the technology that we’ve handled in extreme sports and extreme medicine, and applying that to improve people’s health and to help them get through tough challenges. We deal with the toughest cancers and the grandest challenges. We have a lot of involvement with Sport Relief — you’ve probably seen my friend and fellow cofounder Greg Whyte on the TV this past week with Davina [McCall]. We look after a lot of the Team GB folk and we have a lot of Team GB scientists and medics at our place.
We’re usually on television once a week for one reason or another, which is fun. And that’s really fulfilling our mandate for public engagement. It is a commercial enterprise, but 30 percent of the work we do is public engagement and for charity.
How does CHHP tie in with the technologist side of your career?
What we’ve learned over the years — doing work with elite athletes and from my background originally in medicine and medical technology — is that by using the same degree of monitoring that we use in intensive care, in emergency medicine and in elite sport, we can apply that to people’s lives every day, or to people with chronic illnesses. This helps us radically transform the cost crisis regarding chronic disease and avoidable hospital admissions.
So part of my life — in fact half of my life — is based on the West Coast of America, where my startups are all involved in the application of big data analytics for solving big challenges. I look after the healthcare section of our incubator called Frost Venture Partners. At the moment we manage about 12 companies, soon to be about 20, in the big data analytics space.
Read the full artcile at wired.co.uk