Know Your Wishes

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Alexandra Drane

President and co-founder

Eliza Corporation

Some people wonder if she’s a bit crazy.  It’s clear some of her ideas are… but Alexandra Drane’s unorthodox approach is shaking up a field that needs some shaking – the push to get folks to get fired up about getting healthy.

Alexandra has devoted her career to inspiring people to lead healthier, happier and more engaged lives through the use of innovative technology. Her entrepreneurial spirit and passion for technology and design have led to the launch of four successful healthcare ventures over the past 15 years. Alexandra has proven herself an innovator, whose ideas on using technology to engage people in their health – and her belief in adding a touch of joy to the often staid world of healthcare communications – have been adopted by the nation’s top healthcare organizations.

Alexandra is currently president and co-founder of Eliza Corporation, a leading provider of integrated healthcare communication strategies and one of Entrepreneur magazine’s “100 Brilliant Companies” (2009). The company’s intelligent, tailored interactions—including automated calls powered by a patented speech recognition engine, rich web and multi-modal delivery platform and proprietary sophisticated data analytics—make health and healthcare information more accessible, more actionable and more engaging.

Eliza draws on its database of more than 500 million interactions with individuals about their health to better understand what makes people “tick” and create programs with measurable and sustained impact. Examples include increasing the number of patients who get their recommended diabetes screenings by 76%; more than doubling prescription refills over a six-month period; quadrupling participation in an online smoking cessation program; and boosting younger members’ perceptions of their health plans’ brands beyond what far more expensive traditional advertising campaigns deliver. But perhaps most important are the countless saved lives as the result of timely, personalized health outreach.

Alexandra is also a co-founder of Engage with Grace, a not-for-profit movement launched in October 2008 aimed at helping people understand, communicate and have honored their end-of-life wishes. She received the Boston Business Journal’s “Champions of Healthcare” award for her efforts in this area, and in 2009 Engage With Grace was one of the top ten phrases added to the healthcare lexicon. 

Based on her experience engaging people in conversation about health topics, in 2010 she co-founded a non-profit, web-based movement called SeduceHealth that aims to reframe how the healthcare industry communicates with the people it serves by adding greater passion, joy, and inspiration.

Prior to founding Eliza, Alexandra was a founder of three other healthcare ventures – all focused on developing products that enable individual behavior change through the use of technology.  The output of these ventures included the web-enabled injury-tracking software system adopted by the US Olympic Committee, software that automates dialysis clinics across the U.S., and a medical device proven in clinical trials to improve asthma treatment compliance by over 35%. 

Alexandra sits on the board of Eliza, the Foundation Board of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center (a Harvard Teaching Hospital) in Boston, MA, the Board of Advisors of TEDMED, and on the Board of Directors for the Society for Women’s Health Research ( a national non-profit organization dedicated to improving women’s health through advocacy, education, and research). She also sits on the Board of Directors and the Operations Committee of the Coalition to Transform Advanced Care (C-TAC) and co-chairs C-TAC’s Public Engagement Workgroup. In addition, she is on the Germaine Lawrence Board of Advocates. Alexandra is a member of the Health Executive Leadership Network, Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation, and is a trustee of several charitable trusts.

Alexandra has been named to the Boston Business Journal’s “40 Under 40” list and also appears on the Healthspottr Future Health 100 list, which includes some of the most creative and influential people working in healthcare today.

Alexandra Drane Bio