Dr Millicent Stone is one of the creative minds behind the innovative digital platform, iOWNA, a clinician patient engagement tool that enables clinicians to send trusted relevant personalised information to patients to help improve outcomes and importantly, facilitate patient empowerment in their health and wellbeing journey. For her innovativeness, dedication, and leadership, Dr Stone has been recognised as Most Influential CEO 2022 – London – Join us as we learn more about her career and iOWNA.
Dr Millicent Stone’s inspiration for iOWNA stems from her own experience of being a mother of a very ill child. Her daughter was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer at a young age, and she realised the importance of having the right information at the right time – as that is what helped her and her daughter to better understand the nature of the treatment path and how to navigate each step of the way to survival.
The other factor that inspired her was her approach with her own patients: Millicent builds relationships with her patients and is enthusiastic about the benefits of engaging patients in their treatment journey. Above all, the purpose behind iOWNA is to enable people to live longer, healthier lives.
It was in August 2020, during the COVID-19 pandemic, that iOWNA was launched by DigitalHealth.London, with the initial product to facilitate clinicians in sending trusted information directly to their patients. This helped with the increasing remote care monitoring of patients. Since then, iOWNA has developed the app to enable a two-way trusted information exchange between clinicians and patients to improve patient experience and outcomes. It was recently commissioned by Milton Keynes University Hospital in a partnership programme to drive patient empowerment in the NHS. Milton Keynes is a flagship NHS digital trust. Pilots are ongoing at Imperial Healthcare Trust Lung and Cancer Departments and University College London Hospitals.
Dr Millicent Stone is a consultant rheumatologist and key opinion leader in her field. She began her career by training in Ireland and Canada, and worked in Toronto as a rheumatologist for several years before returning to work in the UK. She chose a career in rheumatology as she enjoys getting to know her patients and helping them over the course of their conditions. She is involved in research, having trained as a clinical epidemiologist in Canada to understand how diseases affect people with arthritis, and her current area of research is development of a sustainability rating index for digital healthcare ventures that can be used to align sustainable innovation to investment in the healthcare sector. This is the focus of her thesis for her degree in healthcare entrepreneurship which she has been doing at Cambridge University Judge Business School over the past two years since leaving her full time role as an NHS Consultant at Guys and St Thomas’ NHS Foundation Trust to pursue healthcare innovation and entrepreneurship full time.
Millicent says, “Sustainability is key to enabling effective innovation to drive improved outcomes and harness the power of the people and the planet to help people live longer healthier lives.” Millicent runs a podcast (www.livelongerthepodcast.com) with focused conversations around her passion for enabling people to live longer, healthier lives and is a changemaking activity for which she was shortlisted for the VC social impact award last year at Cambridge University.
Ultimately, it’s easy to see that Dr Stone is a highly respected figure within her industry, having published in top quality peer review journals and held prestigious peer review grants in the UK, Canada, and USA. She is an established entrepreneur and changemaker; and has also won many prizes for her research in clinical outcomes, including the BMA Doris Hillier Award. Now, she has deservingly achieved extraordinary success within the Most Influential CEO Awards 2022, and we can’t wait to see where her career takes her next.
