Seattle Children's CEO Invents Cheap Ventilator to Save Babies Worldwide

Being a hospital CEO sounds like a mind-numbing, innovation-crushing job to me. I imagine days filled with insurance hassles, egotistical docs, malpractice lawyers, and boring meetings about saving on rubber gloves. At night, I envision wining and dining donors to keep the place afloat. But in between doing everything that a hospital CEO must do, Tom Hansen of Seattle Children's discovered what could be a disruptive idea for saving lives of vulnerable newborn babies. Hansen has led a team at Children's that has invented a prototype called the Hansen Ventilator. It uses technology that's so simple that it could sell for a fraction of the cost of existing life-support machines, be far easier to use, and save thousands of newborns around the world from premature death. If any of this materializes, it would be a big deal for global health.