As a medical doctor and researcher at Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin and Digital Clinician Scientist of the Berlin Institute of Health, Dr. Katarina Braune’s mission is to revolutionize diabetes care through interdisciplinary collaboration, digital technology and by shifting traditional paradigms. Living with diabetes for 20+ years, she is empowering others and raising awareness about innovations emerging from the patient community as a as a global advocate and public speaker. As co-chair of the not-for-profit organization Hacking Health Berlin, she is actively promoting the paradigm shift in healthcare towards patient centricity, e.g. through interdisciplinary hackathons and as an independent consultant and mentor for emerging and leading med tech companies. She is co-leading the EU Horizon 2020-funded and patient-led project “OPEN”, which investigates the #WeAreNotWaiting movement, where an online peer-support community of people with diabetes turned their existing devices into so-called „do-it-yourself” or „open-source” automated insulin delivery systems towards the goal of making state-of-the-art diabetes technology available to everyone.
I want to change the future of diabetes care and redesign the way we support, research and communicate with and about people with diabetes. I want this, because the established solutions do not meet actual needs of patients, their families and healthcare teams, and there is an increasing demand for the patient voice to be included, and for patients to be represented as stakeholders in the development of services, products, policies, and educational resources alike. I can do this, because my research translates experienced-based evidence from the patient community to academia, industry and policymakers, and vice versa. We can only achieve this collaboratively, with patients as the driving force, real-world data as a tool and the spirit of the #WeAreNotWaiting community in mind.