Why Firefly

For generations, fireflies have been a source of wonder and joy. To ancient Aztecs, fireflies were flashes of truth and knowledge in an otherwise dark universe. In Mayan mythology, they symbolized the guiding light of stars. In this sense, the Firefly is a perfect metaphor for what we want to do. Firefly will serve as an instrument of knowledge, guidance, and hope -- especially for those facing their darkest moments.

What Firefly Does

Firefly is about helping you get the right care, at the right time, and in the right place. Whether it’s helping you find a treatment with fewer side effects, a doctor that really understands, or just someone to share tips with, Firefly is here for you.

To better serve you, Firefly often asks questions related to your health. For instance, Firefly may ask what symptoms you are experiencing so it can suggest treatments that have worked for others. Just like your doctor, the more your tell Firefly the better it can do it’s job. And remember, telling Firefly something doesn’t mean anyone else will know about it unless you want them to.

Firefly will start by helping you find the best health information and, if you want, connect with the right support groups and peers. Pretty soon Firefly will also help you discover the best treatments, clinical trials, and doctors for you. Down the road Firefly will not only help you find the best care, but help you manage it as well. For instance, finding the right treatment is great but wouldn’t it also be nice if you could get refills online too? Get them paid for by your insurance plan so you don’t have to spend hours trying to get your hard-earned money back? Join Firefly today, tell us a bit about your health and what you like and don’t like and we’ll get there together – we promise.

Team

Firefly’s team is made up of passionate innovators dedicated to serving you and making healthcare better in the process. Our founders have lived in the trenches of top hospitals in the country, started revolutionary Internet companies like Facebook, and pioneered live-saving treatments for cancer.

Ben Williams, Chief Executive Officer & Founder

Ben has broad experience in both for- and non-profit healthcare. He served as vice chairman and executive director of the Foundation for International Medical Relief of Children, a startup-philanthropic non-governmental organization that serves hundreds of thousands of patients in nine countries. He also represents Careline Services, a startup healthcare-staffing firm, as the founding member of their Advisory Board. Ben was previously an Administrative Resident and Six Sigma Greenbelt at New York-Presbyterian Hospital and has also worked for Merck, Children's Hospital Boston, and Massachusetts Health Quality Partners. While studying biochemistry and health policy at Harvard College, Ben was editor-in-chief of the Harvard Health Policy Review, President of the Harvard Health Policy Society, and teaching assistant for The Quality of Health Care in America, an undergraduate course taught by world-renowned Professors Donald Berwick, Howard Hiatt, and Warner Slack. Before attending Harvard, Ben took a year off to play professional soccer in Taiwan.

Paul H. Ryu, Superstar Engineer, Paul (aka Superstar) has been talking to computers since the first grade, using languages such as C/C++, Perl, PHP, LaTeX, XHTML/JavaScript, and VB/VBScript. In addition to a social networking website he built for fun, he has built websites for the City of Monterey, AMP Media, and the Vianna da Motta Music Foundation, and has won many awards in math, science, and computer programming. Paul worked as Technical Assistant at the Research Science Institute, the premier math, science, and engineering summer institute for high school students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In his free time, he has pondered using DNA for data storage and optimal strategies for solving the Rubik's Cube. Paul studied Computer Science at Harvard College and dreams of being a rock star some day.

Steve Mlodzianoski, Web Developer, wants to build amazing products that people love, that will change the world, or that are just plain fun. His various jobs before Firefly included developing web casino games, maintaining a health insurance rules engine, and coding AJAX-saturated websites. Steve studied Computer Science at Northeastern University and hails from Maine, in a town too north to mention, where the moose and the loon abound.

Jennifer Neves, Director of Recruiting, has over 10 years of experience in corporate recruitment, specifically within both high-tech and biotech industries. Jen is the hunter/gatherer for all things related to employment at Firefly. Jen comes to Firefly with over 10 years of corporate recruitment and human resources experience under her belt, specifically within the high-tech arena. She has extensive experience recruiting for high-growth startup organizations on a national and international basis; staffing executive, management and individual contributor positions across all functional areas. Jen has been responsible for recruitment and human resources at companies such as Macromedia, Berteslmann Media, Infinity, Forrester Research, and Brightcove. Besides considering herself a jedi master at Scrabble, Jennifer is passionate about building dynamic teams at companies aimed at improving society and empowering consumers. She acquired her B.A. in Political Science from University of Vermont.

Advisors

Firefly’s advisors are leaders in the fields of consumer empowerment, medicine, online privacy, the Internet, and enterprise software.

Rita Charon MD, PhD, is Professor of Clinical Medicine and Director of the Program in Narrative Medicine at the Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. A general internist with a primary care practice in Presbyterian Hospital, Dr. Charon took a Ph.D. in English when she realized how central storytelling and listening to stories is to the work of doctors and patients. She directs the Humanities and Medicine curriculum for P&S and teaches literature, narrative ethics, and medical interviewing. She is editor-in-chief of the journal Literature and Medicine and Principal Investigator on research projects that study patient-physician communication and the outcomes of narrative training for medical students and health professionals.

Eric M. David, MD, JD, Chief Medical Officer, served as Assistant Chief Resident in Internal Medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, and is board certified in Internal Medicine. An assistant professor at the Rogosin Institute at the Rockefeller University, he helped lead a team which has taken two novel therapies into clinical trials: a sepsis treatment which was subsequently sold to GlaxoSmithKline, and a cancer therapy which recently entered Phase I trials. He has been a freelance consultant for Deutsche Bank and the United States Department of Health and Human Services. He holds a BA in physics and fine arts from Amherst College, as well as a JD and an MD from Columbia University.

With a father who is a physician and a mother who is a psychologist, I grew up around medicine and around hospitals. I was always taught to believe that doctor's offices and hospitals were places of hope, of empathy, and support. Now that I am a physician and researcher myself, I feel a responsibility to create much more of a community environment in healthcare. I am passionate about finding ways to bring patients together with their family, friends, and caregivers in ways that will enable them to support and teach one another. That is why I am at Firefly. We doctors learn so much about science and medicine in our training, but we learn far more from our patients and their families. Firefly is the best way I know for people all over the world who share common experiences to learn from one another and truly take charge of their own healthcare.

David H. Hughes has served individuals and family members suffering from rare diseases and disorders for nearly a decade. In 1998, he founded the TransGlobal Health Community Center, an online health organization dedicated to providing support networks for people experiencing the challenges of living with rare disorders. David’s network has since grown to include 600 rare disease groups serving over 50,000 members. David served as a Police Officer with Baylor Health Care Systems for over fifteen years and holds a degree in Business Administration from University of North Texas. In 2001, David received Mesquite News’ “Unsung Hero Award,” for individuals who have made significant contributions to their communities. David currently works for St. Paul Traveler’s Insurance as an Underwriting Account Manager.

As a member of the Firefly team, I am proud to play a part in offering our members a life enhancing experience.  The Firefly team is committed to the design and implementation of the best support community on the web. The future of health information and support is Firefly.?>

David K. Jin, MD, PhD, is a clinician-scientist with expertise in regenerative medicine, stem cell biology, angiogenesis, and cancer diagnostics/therapeutics. While actively involved in translational research and clinical trials, he is also a strong advocate of improving quality of life in his patients. Currently, Dr. Jin holds a joint appointment at the Weill Medical College of Cornell University as the Director of Translational Research at the Lehman Brothers Lung Cancer Center of the Department of Cardiothoracic Surgery as well as Assistant Professor of Medicine at the Division of Hematology-Medical Oncology. He is the Founder and President of the Chemokine Foundation and the Counselor for the Society for the Study of Blood. He also currently serves as consultants in areas of drug development, clinical trials, and regulatory affairs for several pharmaceutical companies and investment firms. Dr. Jin completed his Medical Scientist Training Program at Downstate College of Medicine and earned a combined M.D.-Ph.D. in 2000.

Being a clinician-scientist, I am dedicated to bring novel therapeutics and new hope to my patients through cutting-edge biomedical research and innovative clinical trials. In this complex fabric of healthcare system with humans as patients and providers, and technology frequently mediates between them, it is important to weave these elements with a seamless communication system in order to optimize patient care. To this end, there is an unmet need for a cross-culture, cross-discipline “healthcare support community without borders” to allow patients, their families and friends, as well as caregivers to engage in exchange of information, emotion and social support. It is truly a blessing that Firefly takes on this challenge and mission to provide such a supportive sanctuary to bring patients together with their families, friends, and healthcare professionals to share their life stories, build connections, and more importantly, to learn from each others regarding various aspects of managing a disease. I am proud to be a team member of Firefly where I can share my medical knowledge, clinical experience, and unswayed passion to foster wellness and to improve quality of life. – David Jin, MD, PhD ?>

Andrew Palmer, has a track record of 5 successful startups in the past 13 years and is a specialist in accelerating the foundation & growth of early stage companies. His unique blend of strategic perspective and disciplined tactical execution is suited to environments where uncertainty is the rule rather than the exception. In early 2005, Andy partnered with Dr. Stonebraker to found Vertica. Prior to co-founding Vertica, he served as the senior vice president of operations at Infinity Pharmaceuticals , where he was a member of the initial startup team. At Infinity, Andy was responsible for information technology, informatics, operations, finance, human resources, and organizational development as the company raised over $140 million in financing, grew to more than 100 employees, and put its first compound into the clinic for the treatment of cancer. Prior to joining Infinity, as a member of the startup team and vice president of sales and marketing at Bowstreet, Andy led the creation and execution of all early sales, marketing, and professional services initiatives as the company grew from 3 employees to more than 300 employees. Before joining Bowstreet, Andy was the first vice president of marketing at pcOrder.com (NASDAQ: PCOR), where he was directly responsible for dramatic revenue growth and rapid customer acquisition in preparation for a successful initial public offering as the company grew from 5 employees to more than 250 employees. Prior to joining pcOrder, he served as marketing director for pcOrder's parent company, Trilogy Software, Inc. Andy has an M.B.A. from the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College and bachelor's degrees in English, history, and computer science from Bowdoin College.

Warner V. Slack, MD, is Professor of Medicine and Psychiatry at Harvard Medical School, Co-President of the Center for Clinical Computing, and Co-Director of the Division of Clinical Computing, Department of Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center. Dr. Slack is former Editor-in-Chief of MD Computing and author of the best-selling book, Cybermedicine: How Computing Empowers Doctors and Patients for Better Care. Warner earned his BA from Princeton University and his MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons.

Daniel Weitzner, is Policy Director of the World Wide Web Consortium's Technology and Society activities. As such, he is responsible for development of technology standards that enable the web to address social, legal, and public policy concerns such as privacy, free speech, security, protection of minors, authentication, intellectual property and identification. Danny holds an appointment as Principal Research Scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, co-directs MIT's Decentralized Information Group with Tim Berners-Lee, and teaches Internet public policy at MIT. As one of the leading figures in the Internet public policy community, he was the first to advocate user control technologies such as content filtering and rating to protect children and avoid government censorship of the Intenet. These arguments played a critical role in the 1997 US Supreme Court case, Reno v. ACLU, awarding the highest free speech protections to the Internet. He successfully advocated for adoption of amendments to the Electronic Communications Privacy Act creating new privacy protections for online transactional information such as Web site access logs. Before joining the W3C, Danny was co-founder and Deputy Director of the Center for Democracy and Technology, a leading Internet civil liberties organization in Washington, DC. He was also Deputy Policy Director of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He serves on the Boards of Directors of the Center for Democracy and Technology, the Software Freedom Law Center, the Web Science Research Initiative, and the Internet Education Foundation. His publications on technical and public policy aspects of the Internet have appeared in the Yale Law Review, Science magazine, Communications of the ACM, Computerworld, Wired Magazine, and The Whole Earth Review. He is also a commentator for NPR's Marketplace Radio. Danny has a degree in law from Buffalo Law School, and a B.A. in Philosophy from Swarthmore College.