Imagine enduring the life-altering event of a stroke, only to find that surviving is just the beginning. Faced with forbidding odds, studies suggest that nearly 30% of stroke survivors report their quality of life as “worse than death” a year after the event. But what if there were a way to change this?
Kirsten Carroll is turning the tables on this grim landscape. Her startup, Kandu Health, is a groundbreaking company that aims to change how we handle post-stroke care, bringing hope to survivors and their loved ones, who are also affected by this cataclysmic experience.
Armed with a degree in biomedical engineering and a double master's in business and public health, Kirsten's journey took her through marketing and strategic roles at Boston Scientific and Stryker. Then, she shifted to the world of startups at Imperative Care, where she launched their Patient-at-Home initiative, the precursor to what would be Kandu Health.
Stepping out of your comfort zone, especially after success at giants like Boston Scientific and Stryker, into the startup world through Imperative Care, is not for the faint of heart. But Kirsten has always been clear about her priorities. Despite being the primary income earner in her family, she made the move to pursue what she considered her life's work. She credits a network of women leaders in medtech for mentoring her and helping her mentally prepare for such a leap of faith.
What sets Kirsten apart is courage grounded in deep-rooted knowledge and experience. She’s not afraid of the unknown. She knows how to approach huge problems by dividing them into incremental steps. She is able to empower others on their journey together.
Innovation, according to Kirsten, isn’t just tinkering with technology to bring about something new; it’s adapting paradigms, whether they are novel or already exist, to meet the nuanced needs of your target market. Kandu Health focuses on improving the quality of life for stroke survivors through various tech-enabled healthcare services. Their aim isn't only to administer care after a stroke but to help patients reintegrate into community settings and be able to live independently.
They are doing this by partnering up with hospitals and becoming an extension of the care team. Kandu’s Clinical Navigators work with stroke survivors and care partners after hospital discharge to identify recovery needs and deliver personalized care. Some of Kandu’s methods to ease the transition for stroke survivors include one-on-one personalized support through their app, working with Clinical Navigators, and becoming a part of the stroke recovery community.
They also encourage a collaborative approach between patients and their families. For instance, instead of referring to family members or friends as “caregivers,” Kirsten and her team use the term “care partners” to emphasize each stroke survivor’s agency in leading their own recovery, and reflect the teamwork and shared responsibility that exists in their relationships. Kandu Health is committed to empowering stroke survivors to lead both their recoveries and Kandu’s company vision.
Kirsten and her team have already seen remarkable success. Out of the first 40 people to participate in Kandu’s program, over 85% were living independently by the time they graduated. The company expects to see results in larger cohorts presented at industry conferences this winter.
Kandu is already bringing forward a radical change in stroke recovery and the team is excited to see the numbers scale up. “To take that from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 100,000, if we can maintain this level of impact and do it at a bigger and bigger scale, I absolutely cannot wait," says Kirsten.
Key Learnings from Kristen’s Experience
- To optimize for a fulfilling career in medtech, you need to continuously develop your skill sets. Take a layered approach to your decision-making, build a robust foundation of knowledge, and then trust your gut.
- When taking on significant initiatives, adopt a process-oriented approach, break down big challenges into manageable, winnable steps, and build a team around you that is fully aligned with the mission.
- Innovation goes beyond mere invention. Focus not just on your technology but on understanding the needs of multiple stakeholders, including end users and their care partners, healthcare providers, and payers.
Kirsten Carroll is a medtech veteran specializing in neurovascular disorders with nearly 25 years of experience in the field. She holds a degree in biomedical engineering and dual master's degrees in business and public health. Kirsten has held strategic roles at industry leaders like Boston Scientific and Stryker before joining Imperative Care and co-founding Kandu Health. Her startup focuses on revolutionizing post-stroke care and enhancing the quality of life for stroke survivors through tech-enabled healthcare services.
Knowledge Leads to Courage
One of the hallmarks of a seasoned professional in medtech — or any industry, for that matter — is the ability to make informed decisions. Kirsten’s career path is a testament to her resourcefulness in that regard. And it’s definitely not an innate characteristic — but a habit acquired through hard work: building a structured approach to realize opportunities.
Moving from giants like Boston Scientific to a startup like Imperative Care is a big move. Kirsten’s clarity, passion, courage, and strong network of female mentors in medtech helped smooth the transition.
On the topic of courage, Kirsten offers this sage advice: "Courage can't be unfounded. It has to be grounded in experience and knowledge."
Before making substantial career leaps, it's crucial to develop a rock-solid foundation in your domain. In Kirsten's case, she spent a significant period at Boston Scientific honing her skills in full lifecycle product development, from the nuances of design control to downstream commercialization. She shares that remediating a product line while maintaining market share was an incredible challenge that helped her become a master in her domain.
Kirsten is also a strong believer in running a "great process," that is, gathering enough information to be able to make good decisions before moving on to execution. Curating all the relevant particulars before taking action helps to hone your skill sets and carries you forward in your career. But Kirsten also applies this notion on a corporate level by building great processes for organizational decision-making.
For example, she makes a point about the importance of understanding the purpose behind gathering clinical evidence: "As you're developing a clinical trial strategy, you have to start with understanding what you need the evidence for.”
Different stakeholders have different needs and require different kinds of evidence to be convinced. Kirsten notes: "The more you understand what's going to get people to adopt your technology, the better you can design trials that work."
For those adventurous souls willing to venture into startups, the challenge changes from managing an existing organizational structure to creating a new one. Kirsten reflects, "It's one thing to be in operational leadership in an organization that's been around for 40, 50 years, but it's another thing to build something from scratch, build your processes, build your systems, figuring out your company and your culture."
In a startup environment, you're not just a manager or an employee: you're a culture creator, operator, and organizational architect, all at the same time.
A Blueprint for Organizational Decision-Making
Navigating the labyrinthine world of organizational leadership is no small feat, and Kirsten has done it masterfully – thanks in part to her process-oriented mindset. She tells us that tackling enormous projects isn't about facing the entire mountain at once; it's about breaking it down into "winnable steps."
But let's not overlook another key element: the people you surround yourself with. Kirsten can't stress this enough, and she doubles down by saying: “A huge part of the reason that we've been able to create Kandu, and we fundamentally couldn't have done it without this, is that we had a board and investors that were wholly bought into this mission. This isn't something you're going to do if you're not surrounded by the right people.”
In her recent experience with the spin-out of Kandu from its parent company, Imperative Care, this principle of alignment proved essential. It was all about careful planning and connecting to a broader mission of changing the course of stroke recovery.
“Our healthcare system is so fragmented,” she underlines, “If you're going to work with payers, you've got to consider the range: commercial plans, Medicare Advantage Plans, Medicaid Plans, employee benefit plans. No one person can be an expert in all of this.” That’s why you need to build a team that can do this with you.
Kirsten's advisory board is particularly noteworthy. She's assembled not just industry experts but also people who are directly affected by the problems Kandu aims to solve — stroke survivors. "Their perspectives provide invaluable insights into our clinical strategy and trial design, which helps shift mindsets about the solutions we offer," she elaborates, emphasizing the innovative nature of their services in contrast to others in the market. At Kandu, stroke survivors are included in decision-making on topics as diverse as what products to develop, how to write and present privacy policies, and who to hire.
While Kirsten acknowledges the value of establishing an exciting vision, she also emphasizes the importance of breaking it down into incremental, achievable milestones to build confidence and knowledge. With Kandu, this involved various phases. Initial exploratory spending eventually evolved into a fully independent company.
Kirsten reveals that their journey began with addressing a fundamental problem in stroke care: delayed hospital visits due to a lack of care-seeking. People experiencing stroke are often not in pain or aware of the urgency of what has happened. Over time, as they worked directly with stroke survivors, Kandu’s focus expanded to post-acute (or post-survival) challenges and the necessity of offering not just an app but a comprehensive set of healthcare services.
A Calculated Approach to Innovation
In the bustling world of medtech entrepreneurship, innovation often becomes synonymous with invention in the sense of a new device or a breakthrough technology. However, Kirsten offers a refreshing perspective that nudges us to rethink these buzzwords: "Innovation is not just about creating something new but about applying it effectively to solve significant challenges.”
This is something she emphasizes in her yearly lectures at the University of California Berkeley, and it's clear that Kirsten isn't merely paying lip service to this idea — she's living it through her work at Kandu Health.
What separates Kandu from the pack isn't the technology they utilize but the profound understanding of their target audience and their needs. “We aren’t digitizing something that's already being done in a brick-and-mortar setting, or trying to alter it for the better. We are rallying around a problem that needs to be solved, taking that journey, and figuring out where to go,” as Kirsten puts it. This isn't innovation for innovation's sake but rather purpose-driven problem-solving.
To that end, Kirsten and her team are focused on understanding the needs of stroke survivors, care partners, healthcare providers, and payers. It's a multi-stakeholder approach that aims to demonstrate and deliver tangible value to critical players in the healthcare ecosystem.
“There was never a ‘We need a digital health play,’ or ‘We need a services play.’ It was, ‘We need to serve the biggest problem and team up with that community and understand what a solution would look like.’” By focusing on well-designed clinical trials and real-world applications, Kandu is succeeding in convincing stakeholders of the service's undeniable value.
Imagine enduring the life-altering event of a stroke, only to find that surviving is just the beginning. Faced with forbidding odds, studies suggest that nearly 30% of stroke survivors report their quality of life as “worse than death” a year after the event. But what if there were a way to change this?
Kirsten Carroll is turning the tables on this grim landscape. Her startup, Kandu Health, is a groundbreaking company that aims to change how we handle post-stroke care, bringing hope to survivors and their loved ones, who are also affected by this cataclysmic experience.
Armed with a degree in biomedical engineering and a double master's in business and public health, Kirsten's journey took her through marketing and strategic roles at Boston Scientific and Stryker. Then, she shifted to the world of startups at Imperative Care, where she launched their Patient-at-Home initiative, the precursor to what would be Kandu Health.
Stepping out of your comfort zone, especially after success at giants like Boston Scientific and Stryker, into the startup world through Imperative Care, is not for the faint of heart. But Kirsten has always been clear about her priorities. Despite being the primary income earner in her family, she made the move to pursue what she considered her life's work. She credits a network of women leaders in medtech for mentoring her and helping her mentally prepare for such a leap of faith.
What sets Kirsten apart is courage grounded in deep-rooted knowledge and experience. She’s not afraid of the unknown. She knows how to approach huge problems by dividing them into incremental steps. She is able to empower others on their journey together.
Innovation, according to Kirsten, isn’t just tinkering with technology to bring about something new; it’s adapting paradigms, whether they are novel or already exist, to meet the nuanced needs of your target market. Kandu Health focuses on improving the quality of life for stroke survivors through various tech-enabled healthcare services. Their aim isn't only to administer care after a stroke but to help patients reintegrate into community settings and be able to live independently.
They are doing this by partnering up with hospitals and becoming an extension of the care team. Kandu’s Clinical Navigators work with stroke survivors and care partners after hospital discharge to identify recovery needs and deliver personalized care. Some of Kandu’s methods to ease the transition for stroke survivors include one-on-one personalized support through their app, working with Clinical Navigators, and becoming a part of the stroke recovery community.
They also encourage a collaborative approach between patients and their families. For instance, instead of referring to family members or friends as “caregivers,” Kirsten and her team use the term “care partners” to emphasize each stroke survivor’s agency in leading their own recovery, and reflect the teamwork and shared responsibility that exists in their relationships. Kandu Health is committed to empowering stroke survivors to lead both their recoveries and Kandu’s company vision.
Kirsten and her team have already seen remarkable success. Out of the first 40 people to participate in Kandu’s program, over 85% were living independently by the time they graduated. The company expects to see results in larger cohorts presented at industry conferences this winter.
Kandu is already bringing forward a radical change in stroke recovery and the team is excited to see the numbers scale up. “To take that from 10 to 100 to 1,000 to 100,000, if we can maintain this level of impact and do it at a bigger and bigger scale, I absolutely cannot wait," says Kirsten.
Key Learnings from Kristen’s Experience
- To optimize for a fulfilling career in medtech, you need to continuously develop your skill sets. Take a layered approach to your decision-making, build a robust foundation of knowledge, and then trust your gut.
- When taking on significant initiatives, adopt a process-oriented approach, break down big challenges into manageable, winnable steps, and build a team around you that is fully aligned with the mission.
- Innovation goes beyond mere invention. Focus not just on your technology but on understanding the needs of multiple stakeholders, including end users and their care partners, healthcare providers, and payers.
Kirsten Carroll is a medtech veteran specializing in neurovascular disorders with nearly 25 years of experience in the field. She holds a degree in biomedical engineering and dual master's degrees in business and public health. Kirsten has held strategic roles at industry leaders like Boston Scientific and Stryker before joining Imperative Care and co-founding Kandu Health. Her startup focuses on revolutionizing post-stroke care and enhancing the quality of life for stroke survivors through tech-enabled healthcare services.
Knowledge Leads to Courage
One of the hallmarks of a seasoned professional in medtech — or any industry, for that matter — is the ability to make informed decisions. Kirsten’s career path is a testament to her resourcefulness in that regard. And it’s definitely not an innate characteristic — but a habit acquired through hard work: building a structured approach to realize opportunities.
Moving from giants like Boston Scientific to a startup like Imperative Care is a big move. Kirsten’s clarity, passion, courage, and strong network of female mentors in medtech helped smooth the transition.
On the topic of courage, Kirsten offers this sage advice: "Courage can't be unfounded. It has to be grounded in experience and knowledge."
Before making substantial career leaps, it's crucial to develop a rock-solid foundation in your domain. In Kirsten's case, she spent a significant period at Boston Scientific honing her skills in full lifecycle product development, from the nuances of design control to downstream commercialization. She shares that remediating a product line while maintaining market share was an incredible challenge that helped her become a master in her domain.
Kirsten is also a strong believer in running a "great process," that is, gathering enough information to be able to make good decisions before moving on to execution. Curating all the relevant particulars before taking action helps to hone your skill sets and carries you forward in your career. But Kirsten also applies this notion on a corporate level by building great processes for organizational decision-making.
For example, she makes a point about the importance of understanding the purpose behind gathering clinical evidence: "As you're developing a clinical trial strategy, you have to start with understanding what you need the evidence for.”
Different stakeholders have different needs and require different kinds of evidence to be convinced. Kirsten notes: "The more you understand what's going to get people to adopt your technology, the better you can design trials that work."
For those adventurous souls willing to venture into startups, the challenge changes from managing an existing organizational structure to creating a new one. Kirsten reflects, "It's one thing to be in operational leadership in an organization that's been around for 40, 50 years, but it's another thing to build something from scratch, build your processes, build your systems, figuring out your company and your culture."
In a startup environment, you're not just a manager or an employee: you're a culture creator, operator, and organizational architect, all at the same time.
A Blueprint for Organizational Decision-Making
Navigating the labyrinthine world of organizational leadership is no small feat, and Kirsten has done it masterfully – thanks in part to her process-oriented mindset. She tells us that tackling enormous projects isn't about facing the entire mountain at once; it's about breaking it down into "winnable steps."
But let's not overlook another key element: the people you surround yourself with. Kirsten can't stress this enough, and she doubles down by saying: “A huge part of the reason that we've been able to create Kandu, and we fundamentally couldn't have done it without this, is that we had a board and investors that were wholly bought into this mission. This isn't something you're going to do if you're not surrounded by the right people.”
In her recent experience with the spin-out of Kandu from its parent company, Imperative Care, this principle of alignment proved essential. It was all about careful planning and connecting to a broader mission of changing the course of stroke recovery.
“Our healthcare system is so fragmented,” she underlines, “If you're going to work with payers, you've got to consider the range: commercial plans, Medicare Advantage Plans, Medicaid Plans, employee benefit plans. No one person can be an expert in all of this.” That’s why you need to build a team that can do this with you.
Kirsten's advisory board is particularly noteworthy. She's assembled not just industry experts but also people who are directly affected by the problems Kandu aims to solve — stroke survivors. "Their perspectives provide invaluable insights into our clinical strategy and trial design, which helps shift mindsets about the solutions we offer," she elaborates, emphasizing the innovative nature of their services in contrast to others in the market. At Kandu, stroke survivors are included in decision-making on topics as diverse as what products to develop, how to write and present privacy policies, and who to hire.
While Kirsten acknowledges the value of establishing an exciting vision, she also emphasizes the importance of breaking it down into incremental, achievable milestones to build confidence and knowledge. With Kandu, this involved various phases. Initial exploratory spending eventually evolved into a fully independent company.
Kirsten reveals that their journey began with addressing a fundamental problem in stroke care: delayed hospital visits due to a lack of care-seeking. People experiencing stroke are often not in pain or aware of the urgency of what has happened. Over time, as they worked directly with stroke survivors, Kandu’s focus expanded to post-acute (or post-survival) challenges and the necessity of offering not just an app but a comprehensive set of healthcare services.
A Calculated Approach to Innovation
In the bustling world of medtech entrepreneurship, innovation often becomes synonymous with invention in the sense of a new device or a breakthrough technology. However, Kirsten offers a refreshing perspective that nudges us to rethink these buzzwords: "Innovation is not just about creating something new but about applying it effectively to solve significant challenges.”
This is something she emphasizes in her yearly lectures at the University of California Berkeley, and it's clear that Kirsten isn't merely paying lip service to this idea — she's living it through her work at Kandu Health.
What separates Kandu from the pack isn't the technology they utilize but the profound understanding of their target audience and their needs. “We aren’t digitizing something that's already being done in a brick-and-mortar setting, or trying to alter it for the better. We are rallying around a problem that needs to be solved, taking that journey, and figuring out where to go,” as Kirsten puts it. This isn't innovation for innovation's sake but rather purpose-driven problem-solving.
To that end, Kirsten and her team are focused on understanding the needs of stroke survivors, care partners, healthcare providers, and payers. It's a multi-stakeholder approach that aims to demonstrate and deliver tangible value to critical players in the healthcare ecosystem.
“There was never a ‘We need a digital health play,’ or ‘We need a services play.’ It was, ‘We need to serve the biggest problem and team up with that community and understand what a solution would look like.’” By focusing on well-designed clinical trials and real-world applications, Kandu is succeeding in convincing stakeholders of the service's undeniable value.
