Hacking health care
For as long as she can remember, Andrea Ippolito has known that she wanted to be an engineer. What she couldn’t have predicted was what, precisely, the scope and scale of her work would turn out to be. Ippolito began her career at Boston Scientific after getting bachelor’s and master’s degrees in biomedical engineering from Cornell University. Back then, she worked on drug-coated medical devices and studied how they interfaced with the surrounding cells of a patient. She liked working on those systems, but also began fostering an interest in health care engineering on a more macroscopic scale: Rather than one device, one human, or one interface, Ippolito wanted to look at the entire health care ecosystem. “I was drawn into the strategy of the technology as well as the technology,” she says. It was that newfound fascination that brought her to the MIT System Design and Management (SDM) program in 2011, and then to...