The third episode of the Tech for Good August series features Mary Carbajal, CEO and founder of B1OS, a company committed to provide secure and efficient access to health information allowing for real-time sharing of data with anyone, anywhere. Mary talks about leveraging technology to create groundbreaking innovation in healthcare. She also addresses the issue of medical transparency for people to be able to share their individual health information with doctors or even family members. Likewise, Mary shares the importance of taking care of yourself for overall wellbeing, especially through this COVID-19 pandemic. Listen to her story.
Show Notes
At the end of the show, the guests share a sneak preview into their favourite music or books by answering the same set of questions. Here are the links to Mary’s answers. The books she is currently reading are Draw the Circle by Mark Batterson, and The Mom Test by Rob Fitzpatrick. Her favourite music is Gospel with go-to artists Tasha Cobbs Leonard and Sinach. The book that particularly resonated with her at a specific time in her life is The Alchemist by Paolo Coelho. Her all-time favourite book that she absolutely recommends is A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose by Eckhart Tolle.
If you want to follow Mary on social media, you can find her on Twitter and LinkedIn.
In case you wish to have more information on B1OS, you can visit their website or follow them through their social media handles: LinkedIn,Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube.
Episode Transcript
Claire 00:10
Hi everyone and welcome to a new episode of the Narratives of Purpose podcast. I am your host Claire Muigande. On this podcast I bring you inspiring individual stories of ordinary people who are making extra ordinary social impact in their communities all around the world. And hopefully, I can inspire you to take action. This week is the third episode of our Tech for Good series. Today we address health technology with my guest Mary Carbajal, who is the CEO and founder of B1OS, B1OS is on a mission to empower every individual with access and ownership of their personal health information. In our discussion, we talk about medical transparency, in this era of digitization and technological advancements. Please take a moment to rate and review our show by subscribing to the podcast on your favourite app. But right now have a listen to Mary's journey in building the first truly global health information solution.
Claire 01:17
I'd like to really welcome you warmly on the show. Mary. Hi, how are you today?
Mary 01:21
Oh, I'm doing fabulous. Thank you so much, Claire. It's such a pleasure to be here with you today.
Claire 01:25
It's my pleasure. It's my pleasure, I'm really happy that you're taking the time to spend these few minutes with me today. And before we start with our discussion, I just want to give a bit of a glimpse to the audience why I invited you. So I heard you speak recently in an interview, you were speaking about B1OS. And I was really fascinated to see that people are really using technology for good - in a sense, and especially in the healthcare environment, so many things are going on right now. And I thought it would be nice to have you on and to discuss a bit more on what you're doing, why you're doing it, and what you expect, what are the outcomes you're expecting. But before we go into that, let me leave you a couple of minutes to introduce yourself to our listeners and share some of your background. So what would you like our listeners to know about you?
Mary 02:13
I think, you know, first and foremost, I always lead with what's the most important thing in my life. And that's God. So you know, I am a woman of God led by God. And people who talk to me say, "Oh, you found it B1OS" I say "actually God founded B1OS, it was a good idea, you know, I'm just the co founder," so you know, I'm very blessed, I've had an incredible life thus far, and it's just gonna get better from here by God's grace, but I am recently from New York, born of European immigrants, and adopted by an African American family in the deep south of Louisiana. So I've got a lot of diversity in my background and I have been very blessed to work in corporate most of my life and with that came the benefits of being able to work around the world, I've worked in over 50 countries around the globe, I've lived in seven by God's amazing grace, and had a real opportunity to do what's really important to me, which is to meet people to learn about people, to learn about culture and how do people think and what works and what doesn't work. So I grew up through IT, I took about every discipline you can imagine, through the, through the industry of technology. And along that path, I've been afforded incredible opportunities to learn to grow, develop, and to lead incredible teams around the globe. Yeah, so I decided to leave corporate America and take a leap of faith as they always call it right and muster up some of that courage, I have to go do something that serves humanity. So people are very important to me. And I wanted to address an issue that serves everyone in the world, not just some people.
Claire 03:59
Yeah. Wow, that's really a fascinating background, I have to say, and you've really been so successful at what we've done so far. In corporate America, you've worked in so many different countries on different continents. So I'm curious to know, why did you move from all these other industries into health care, and really to fund your own, you know, your own ventures for healthcare, so why health care and why B1OS?
Mary 04:24
So for me, I think some of the challenges we have in healthcare, there needs to be a focus on marrying technology and healthcare together, right. So marrying all the aspects of health from the medical side of the industry, as well as technology. And so when I left the corporate world, back at the end of 2018, is when I was really starting to think about this a lot. We had a lot of challenges in the world, with people unfortunately having to leave their country and flee their countries. And so the refugee challenges were growing rapidly, right? And at first, I thought, "How do I solve this problem that I'm trying to solve here in B1OS, or that we have solved with B1OS. And we're getting ready to actually launch here pretty soon. How do we solve it for people who are in migrant situations, right?" So they're moving, perhaps from their countries, in refugee camps, or in different refugee refugee camps, perhaps and even in underserved communities around the globe, right. So I really started with that at the forefront of my mind, because I always believe as a technologist, when you can design technology to work in underserved communities around the world where they may not have access to all the technology, if you can get around it somehow and still serve those communities, then you can solve it for everyone, right? And so I really wanted to address a problem that we could go after, and, and be able to positively impact all of humanity. Right? And so that's why I jumped in that space. And yeah, I'm a strong believer that just because you're very savvy in one particular industry, such as technology, for example, when you put the right people around you, so make sure you surround yourself with the right team and the right advisors, then yeah, you can jump into any industry, I think.
Claire 06:21
So how did you manage to find the right people to go that path?
Mary 06:26
Maybe quickly, I'll address what problem we decided to try to go after. Yeah. So there's three major problems that we wanted to address. So the first challenge we wanted to address is, "how do we set up an environment where we can allow all individuals to have all of their, what doctors would call their medical history, with them at all times? Regardless if they had a phone? Or if they didn't have a phone. And so how do they have the ability to put all that information stored in the cloud, and protected by the highest level of security out there today, which we have protected by blockchain technology. And so how could we do that to where that data entry is no longer redundant. And that's for everybody in the world, right? Because you know, we go into the doctor's, we fill out 15 pages of paper, sign forms, all that good stuff, and we have to do it almost every time we go in. And that's mainly partly due to the fact that our health could have changed, obviously, from the last time that we've been in. The challenge, though, is that we don't get to reuse that data, or update that data on our own time, and have it readily available. So getting rid of the redundancy, and being able to streamline that process, enter your data in once and update it when necessary, share it with whoever you want, whenever you want around the world. The second problem we wanted to address was there's very little transparency across medical professionals. I think we're working on that in the States and we're trying to get better at that. And there are a few countries that do that, well, but they are not the exception, not the norm. And so be able to have information where you share your medical profile within bios, to three or four different doctors, as long as it's not psychiatric data, those doctors will be able to see their data. So if you've got a cardiologist and an endocrinologist and of GP, general practitioner, or any doctor for any specialty, then those doctors when they update records, your records, or we pull that data through an API, and populate your profile, then everybody has access to that data at the same time. So it's real time up to date data that allows your medical professionals to provide more optimal care and to see you as a complete person, right? Not just cardiologists, looking at your cardiovascular system, for example. And then the last problem and challenge that we really wanted to address was, "how can we identify an individual biometrically?" Instead of you know, people are now putting chips in people to test that out? And I'm just not a huge fan of that personally, but how do we allow a human being to use a God given print on their body, right that's unique to them and be able to identify themselves and pull their health information up. And so we have patented technology now that allows people to biometrically use their hand, their entire hand, fingerprints, handprint, veins, everything to actually identify who they are and pull up their health information. So those are the problems we were trying to go after. Right. And so now you're serving almost every community there is out there. You're even serving, you don't have to go to underserved communities outside of the states. We have many inside the states.We have many homeless populations, unfortunately, throughout the states, and I was just talking to some ER doctors and they were all over the fact that this would be great to use to help and manage some of the homeless population from a medical perspective, right. And so once I knew the problem we were going after to try to solve, then I knew the people I had to get around me, right, I needed to get some really great ER doctors, I needed to get just doctors in general researchers. And I have some life science people, people in the genome space around me professionals, that are professional nurses, you know, that are really boots on the ground, right, that are in and out patients every single day. And of course, you know, getting the right folks from a technology point of view. Right. So I've got an incredible gentleman that's working with me in the security space, ensuring that we've got all the right controls in place and all that good stuff.
Claire 10:43
That's a very important point in terms of, you know, security, because these are obviously sensitive data. I'm sure you have that covered as well, in the technology space. There's one thing you mentioned in the second point that you're addressing, you mentioned the word API, can you just expand on that, in case people don't know what that is?
Mary 10:58
So API means Application Interface, right. And so what we've done is we've kind of built the foundation to where first you can come in, and you can put your own information. And so it's kind of like, instead of filling out that paperwork, you're putting in an app now, and now you have access to it. And my mother, she's passed by now. But she suffered from diabetes, a very, very bad diabetic, and for the last 10 years of her life, I took care of her. And so she was in and out of doctor's surgeries. She had four amputations on her body and was in dialysis the last four years of her life. So that's an incredible amount of medical information, and prescriptions that you can imagine. I had to keep a spreadsheet for all that information. Yeah. But a spreadsheet didn't allow me to take pictures of labs and put in information around any kind of scans or whatnot that you may have had. And so yeah, I had to literally keep it a thick folder of information. And so we took that into consideration when we first designed B1OS. So when I went through, and I designed what it should look like, I wanted first the ability for us to be able to enter our own data. And then we get to the point where we are going to start looking at how we connect to existing systems out there. So there are existing EHR systems that are out there. A lot of these systems are built for institutions, and patients really don't have access to it. But there are a lot of them that patients do have access to, and some of their data goes out there. However, you can't share that data very freely. So that data is there, it's in a system that exists. We've got some great backend systems, and we're not here to compete with those guys, we're here to compliment them. We've got the patient at the centre of what we're doing. And we're saying, "hey, let's allow the patient to pull that data in and be able to have a platform that they can use that will not only have their information at their fingertips and allow them to share it with whomever, wherever they're at in the world. But it's also going to educate them," so we're building educational services into it as well to educate people about their health.
Claire 13:03
That's great. And I can absolutely relate to that, you know, when you're speaking about having a large folder of medical information. I, for myself, have moved so many times within Switzerland, which is quite small, but you probably know that they also have different languages. So I moved from French speaking to German speaking and because I have a chronic condition, I couldn't keep like my treating physician from one city to another one. So I had to kind of move with my own data, right? And I could absolutely see the benefit there. You know, even for someone like me. Who could just you know, I have a new doctor, I live in a new place or an interfit and a new specialist and everything is in one space. And I actually control it, you know, so that's it's very empowering for the individual, and you really connect and create this transparency and trust with your treating physician. So I think it's going to be quite revolutionary!
Mary 13:57
Absolutely. You know, we are a game changer you know, we really are if you think about it. There's been a few industries where you can think about who are some players out there that really forever changed an industry. And you think about Apple, of course, Apple comes right to top of mind right and and Apple forever changed in industry on a few different levels. But one in particular, if you think about the way back, it's the whole streaming music capability. Not that they were the first ones to stream music, but they were the first ones to give you that user experience where it was pretty seamless. The same with Airbnb you think about, we now think differently of where we stay when we leave home. And whether it's on vacation, or go away for a few days, whatever the case might be. And then Amazon, of course, another big giant, that really changed the way we buy. I think B1OS will be one of those forever changing solutions, right? That will forever change the way we view access and share health information.
Claire 14:57
So you just heard that it will be launching very soon in Q3. It's been a year and a half, since we're all going through this pandemic. How has the COVID-19 situation influenced or affected your activities at this point?
Mary 15:12
Yeah, it did both. And, and you know, I always say “God's will, God's way and God's time," right. So I'm a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. So, I mean, when we first started in October of 2019, we set out to build an MVP. So I went out to India, we sat down with the team, designed it, and we sat down, and we worked through it and built it together. And so we had an MVP ready in February, which was the plan, we would be done by February, February. And we would use February for the whole month of just slamming it right, just testing, testing, testing, and load testing, and unit testing and making sure everything worked perfectly. We actually had lined up a huge insurance company in Malaysia, because at the time, I was doing a little bit of work in Malaysia as well and trying to drum up some business at the same time since I was there, we had a set of doctors and doctors that I'm sure we're still going to go after, as soon as soon as some of the lockdowns were lifted in that part of the world, but we have a group of doctors in Malaysia with a huge insurance company that we were talking to there. And we were ready to get get started with them. And then we went into lockdown in March. And we went into lockdown in India and in Asia before the US went into lockdown. So then everything came to a screeching halt. What it did was it really gave me an opportunity to pivot in two ways. What we did was we kind of went through that MVP, and MVP is what it is, right? And so you put everything you can to get the best possible product to start with. But we were not as deep as I would have liked us to be. And so and that really rich user experience that we have now, today we didn't have in February last year. We had a very basic interface on the front end, but it still allowed you to do the sharing, and it'll allow you to have access to information and whatnot, and put your own information and still have that. But I wasn't crazy about the user interface. So it did two things. So we pivoted, we added a whole COVID piece into the app. And we also redesigned the entire user interface. Because what I wanted was I didn't want people to kind of box us into "Oh, it's just another EHR system." It's not, it's very different. So while we allow medical records to be stored, and they have a small EHR platform with online appointments, scheduling and payment scheduling, and telemedicine, telepresence built into it, all that good stuff. We again, for those underserved communities that are driving everything on paper, because we were also talking to the government of Kammanadu at the time, and so when we got to that point, we said, "let's take this opportunity to really build an interface that's going to bring people in that app every day. So we build reminders for prescriptions, we build reminders for appointments, we integrate Google Maps to help you find out how to get to a doctor right from your app. So if you've got an appointment that's scheduled there, we actually give you a little direction button right on your appointment, and it maps you right to their office. We integrated deeply, we integrated Zoom deeply into it and so we've got telemedicine completely integrated in it. Yeah, a lot of bells and whistles like that. But we also really took a focus on making sure that we give you health tips every day, we can take a dashboard of your health or your vitals. And so what we worked on was integrating wearables. So we integrated the iwatch, the Fitbit, we're working on integrating Accu Chek, and a few others that are IoT devices that people use today. And then we're going to present that in very much like a fitness dashboard that you see today. So you've got over the course of days or weeks or months, you as well as all your doctors that you share your information with. So your cardiologist, your intercrop chronologist. For example, if someone had diabetes, and their doctor wanted students to track. 9 out of 10 times, they're sending it over WhatsApp or they're putting on a piece of paper and they're taking pictures, sending it to a doctor or just bringing it into the office when they go to visit. But if a doctor is really worried about their patients, and want to track more remotely as well, or they're going to jump on a telepresence call, then they have all that data right there in B1OS that they can see without having to pass paper back and forth or other messages because all the data is right there. You just track your numbers during the week. And then you can look at that dashboard "Okay, here's my sugars for the last three days, six days, 30 days, here's my blood pressure, here's my heart rate," we even allow you to put in ECG information. And any radiology reports, any scans, whatnot, all that can be uploaded.
Claire 20:10
Wow, that's absolutely amazing. I mean, it is almost unbelievable, right? You have all this in your brain to some extent. But now everything can be seen by your physician, and you have everything integrated. I mean, you can't get more real time than that, right?
Mary 20:24
The beautiful thing about that, for me, is that I especially think about my mom again. You know, I couldn't just forget some medications that she was taking, right? And all that is just too much, especially if you have children, you have a family, we have a family, and you put all your kids information, the beautiful thing about this as well, is you can actually have your parents share their profile with you as well. And you can track your parents health, you can even see all the prescriptions, even the reminders. So for example if my mum was still alive, and I wasn't living with her, I could just look and see if she had been taking her medicine, because we give you a little box, you can just hit the button and check that you've been taking it right. And it's a reminder even for yourself. I wanted to create an environment that really was very family centric, you know, because where we're going with this is we want to get to predictive analysis, we want to build an AI engine on the back of it, start pulling in genomic data and do predictive analysis. I have a very dear friend of mine, like a brother to me, and he called me out of the blue one day and told me he had stage four colon cancer. And so what he thought was irritable bowel syndrome. But he had six months to live, and he didn't even make it past three. And it was very devastating to his family and to his friends. And, could we have saved his life? Was that possible? Because that's where I want to go. And his father had the same thing, by the way. And so I want the engine to sit in the back and go, "put your family history in there. And you know, that this has happened in your family, and you know, you know, that's genome data in there, you've got your history of all of your medical records and visits to the doctor and what you were treated for. And so that's going to crunch that data together and be able to give you curated data specific to your health needs and your health condition, or the needs of your child or whatever the case might be. And even for people that are you know, we're going to put standards in there. There are certain standards out there, if you're female, you're in a certain age group, you should have a mammogram. If you pass a certain age that probably that time decreases, every year, instead of every three years. And guys, are you getting your colon checked? Or are people over 50 getting your colonoscopy done? Those types of things, so they can adhere to it or not, the whole point is to change the narrative. And to really kind of flip the paradigm around living a very reactive restorative lifestyle, and move forward into a very proactive and preventative one.
Claire 23:04
That was actually one of my follow up questions. And you kind of answered it already, is that I really noticed that like a year ago, I started educating myself on new technologies and what's out there, what can be done nowadays, almost everybody on this planet has a smartphone. And within that smartphone, there's so many things that collect whatever it is that you're doing around yourself. And on top of that people also have smartwatches and other things, and you're basically creating your own individual data. And I was wondering, can we actually move healthcare back to what healthcare? Caring for health, and not caring for the disease, but being more into prevention, basically. And that's actually what you're addressing? Right?
Mary 23:48
Yeah, that was huge for me, because I think that there's so much data out there now, right? I mean, we have now come into the world of everybody having an opinion about something, and not that that's a bad thing, but sometimes it's just hard to know, what's real? Where do I get the real information from? And accurate information as well. And so for me, it's really about providing a solid platform that educates people on their health and educates them on, you know, any kind of prescriptions, supplements, whatever they're taking, it educates them on what's out there that's addressing their needs. So yeah, our main objective is really to go after helping people live a healthier life.
Claire 24:42
I see that and I truly believe that, you know, B1OS is going to be an absolute game changer and will make a huge impact. And bouncing back off that you just mentioned education. So from your perspective, what types of gaps or needs do you see, now let's focus perhaps on healthcare, to help adopt more technology?
Mary 25:00
My humble opinion is this. There are a lot of incredible data sources out there, right? The challenge though, is that there's so many. And so how do we B1OS we believe in the power of 1. That's why I put in a "1" in the name of B1OS. So at B1OS, we truly believe in the power of one, that means we're one life, we should have one source for all of our health information. And it's not that we're the end all be all of everything, that's not it, we need all of these other components out there to bring the right information to the right individual. And so all these incredible platforms that really tell people what they need to know, there are just so many. So what we're trying to do - we're not trying we're doing - what we're doing at B1OS is we are taking those creditable data sources, and we're bringing data to the individual instead of the individual having to go figure out where to find this data? So you know, you think about our health and the first thing we get nervous about is "okay, oh, my God is something wrong?" And then all of a sudden, our blood pressure rises, we get a bit nervous, we get a bit concerned, and then we may be all over the place searching for information. So what if we could curate that data and bring that data to you and hand it to you based on what's in your medical records? So if we could do that, I think that's a game changer in itself.
Claire 26:45
And do you see that there might be some concerns in terms of governance, because things are changing. So quickly, so fast, especially in terms of technology. And there's always this issue about, you know, who owns the data? What do you do with the data and regulations are kind of running behind that? So what do you see there? Would that be an issue at some point? Or how do you see that?
Mary 27:07
Yeah it is and, you know, that's the one thing, as far as I'm concerned, regulations are always behind the eight ball. So for me, HIPAA is a huge regulatory challenge that we have to face. And so HIPAA puts out a list of criteria, if you're going to have medical data, these are the things that you need to follow. There's ISO certifications out there to ensure that you are collecting and safekeeping data in the right manner. And then there's GDPR, where you've got to have the ability to be able to forget right and forget someone and get their information. The biggest challenge, though, is really around the fact that in the United States alone, it's absurd to be quite honest with you, and I'm really hoping to help be a part of fixing this challenge, right? In every state, almost there different regulations around how long a doctor keeps information, or how long the hospital keeps information, and I was talking to some, some very senior folks that really they run the health department, research department, medical research department at a few of their universities, and I was chatting with them about this. Why is it necessary? I got to know doctors there as well, so I even called on their expertise to say, "How's it working in your country? And why do you think this is?" And so they all agreed on one thing, there's no reason it has to be that way. It's over complicated for no reason. And so how do we help address that? So what we've done is we've taken the worst case scenario timing wise, and we've looked across entire states. Doctors across majority of states are anywhere from three to seven years, and hospitals are anywhere from 20 to 30 years, and so we've gone on the higher up on that to start, and hopefully we're going to work with legislation and figure out how we can in the future get down to where we can get a more standard record timing-wise, across not only The States, but it's there's no reason it's not across the globe, if you think about it, it doesn't matter whether you're sitting in Burundi, Africa, or you're sitting in Manhattan, New York, if you have colon cancer, you have colon cancer at whatever stage. And while it may affect you a little bit differently, overall, the data - there's no reason we have to have the data in such a mess that it's in today.
Claire 29:36
I'd like to switch gears a bit here. There is from what I've seen, and also listen, you know, listening to you speak and the first conversation we had, my observation is that there is this common theme in everything you do this, this kind of red thread, which is you know, healing and hope. And I also saw that on your website, the B1OS website, a portion of all your revenues will be donated to support Education in rural areas. And recently, you also mentioned that to me, you actually funded another organisation, which if I'm not mistaken, called ICU in Texas. Tell me a bit about what drives you there. I know in the beginning it talked a lot about God and spirituality, because the industry, where you've been, and now also in healthcare, you're also doing some groundbreaking work. But you always have this theme, which is healing and hope - So can you talk about that a bit?
Mary 30:29
That's kind of where my heart's at, right? And so for me, I wanted to be able to figure out long before the idea of B1OS came in, I mean, ever since I was a child, I hated injustice. Hate is a strong word, I never use it, but let me tell you how much I hate injustice. And so I am one of those people, I faced a lot of adversity growing up, and whether it was at home or whether it was at school, I didn't fit in. I couldn't figure out where I really belonged, I got bullied a lot, got picked on, I was abused actually, to a certain degree, and it was terrible. And yet children go through that all over the world. And so I went to a Catholic school, and I came across in fourth grade, these little what was called Mariner books, these little pamphlets that we would get missionaries would come in from across very underserved parts of the world. And they would talk to us, either in church or at school and whatnot. And since then, I always knew that I was going to do something to change the lives of children and people around the world that didn't have access to education, or any kind of health services. So I knew I wanted to be in that space somehow. And so, fast forward to many years later, you know, I started a company, a nonprofit called ICU. And it's called ICU because there are so many people in the world that we turn a blind eye to. I want them to know that we see them, I always knew that I wanted to try to eradicate poverty, you know, and how does one person do that if it doesn't happen. But if I can do my small part in it, then I know I will have left this earth in a better place than I found it. And so for me, I think to eradicate poverty, we won't put a dent in it until we educate people. So we can go all around the world and spend a lot of money building houses for people and sending food - and that's the right thing to do. By the way, don't get me wrong. However, I think if we taught them how to build a house, and we gave them the materials and we provided that kind of stuff to them, give them a fishing pole and teach them how to fish. Right? Don't don't just give them a fish. I'm a firm believer in that. So I started "I See You" because I want to utilise my know how, what I've done, and I want to get the right people around me, that's going to call for some very innovative people that's going to come into my circle of which I've been praying for very much, and what I've done in ICU, I have built a blueprint of how do we go and build regenerative environments in underserved parts of the world, even in refugee camps? So how do we go and look at it from the logistic infrastructure layer up all the way to bring remote education into those areas? Which means I don't bring connectivity to them? How do we bring the right water sources to them? Can we put in hydroponic farming for them and teach them how to do that to make sure that they have enough food for eating because if you can't stay healthy, you're not going to be able to study and use your brain to your fullest potential. And then I'll talk about how we bring in educational services. I mean, if COVID taught us anything it taught us, you know how quickly we can go to a remote world. And now look at all these amazing companies that are coming out that are truly changing their game changers in the educational space, right? And so we want to bring those companies on board and do kind of remote learning. And then we want to people in these in these villages and in these rural areas and refugee camps, give them the opportunity to start learning if they want to do triage for medical, from a medical perspective, because getting in front of health issues is not a nine times out of ten is one of the biggest benefits, right? So how do we marry those capabilities into a blueprint to where any NGO or anybody can pick it up and go. We've got that blueprint, we're going to go out and we're gonna implement this because no one person is going to do it. We have to do it as a collective, and do what we can to make this world a better place and a safer place for our children and their children's generations to come.
Claire 34:42
No, I see. Absolutely. It's really a collective effort and education plays a major role. If you're educated you're basically empowered to make decisions for yourself to build your own livelihoods and for your family and so on. So kudos for that. So in the last section of the show, what I like to do is to get a small preview or into what my guests read or what music they like to listen to and I have three short questions. So are you ready for my three questions?
Mary 35:10
Oh my gosh. Okay. Yes!
Claire 35:12
So the first one is, what book are you reading at this moment? Or if you don't read books, and you're more of a music person, What music are you listening to on a regular basis these days?
Mary 35:24
I'm reading an incredible book that one of my cohorts members just came out of an accelerator here in Houston. And she gave me a book called Draw The Circle. And it's a spiritual book. It's a book on your prayer life. And actually, being very intentional about prayer and literally drawing a circle around what your intentions are and focusing on that and just improving your prayer. I'm really into spiritual books, and I'm from a work perspective. I'm reading a book that's The Mothers Tests, and it's how you set up testing for products that you're bringing to the market and the mommy test. I think it's something like that. But yeah, one of my favourite books right now is Draw the Circle. That's pretty powerful if you're interested in it. And music, I love music. Oh my gosh, you know - music, it gets the soul moving. So of course, my favourite music is gospel music. And so I love turning on gospel music and Tasha Cobbs and so those are my "go to's". But I grew up in R&B. Again, I was adopted by an African American family and I grew up with a lot of this music. My father is a big Miles Davis and Al Green fan.
Claire 36:47
You spoke about R&B and so on, but is there perhaps a specific song or even book because you said you like reading books? That was that particularly resonated with you at some point in your life, something that you really remember fondly about?
Mary 37:02
Yeah, The Alchemist. Favourite right? Alchemist is one of my favourite books.
Claire 37:06
Alchemist. That's the one by Paulo Coelho, right?
Mary 37:09
Yeah, he's one of my favourites, by the way.
Claire 37:13
And the last question was basically, do you have a one book that you absolutely recommend? So I'm wondering if that is Alchemist or something else? Or even music that you'd say people have to read this, or people have to listen to this music?
Mary 37:26
I think one of the most life changing books for me was A New Earth by Eckhart Tolle. I read it many years ago, but Eckhart is one of my favourite authors as well, so there was one book, and I've given this book away to many people. So if there was one of my favourite books or a book that I normally give away, often, it is Eckert Tolle new Earth.
Claire 37:49
I'll make sure that I have those references in the show notes in case people want to have a look. And we're really now at the end of the show, I could spend hours listening to you. Unfortunately, I don't think you have all that time available. But I'd really like to thank you for taking the time for join me today. And I'd like to give you the last word. And, you know, if there's one thing that you'd like your listeners to take out of our conversation, when would that be?
Mary 38:13
So it's just been such a pleasure to talk to you, Claire, as I really enjoy our conversations. For me right now, the one thing obviously, I have an ask, as well. So if there are any academia institutions out there, or medical institutions that are very interested in what we're doing, we're taking on pilots, so we're taking on pilots with universities, because what we're doing is we're bringing medical data into universities as well online, and working with a lot of athletic clubs within those universities as well. So regardless of where you are in the world. And if you've got any communities where everything is just done on paper, and you're looking to digitise that, then definitely reach out to us. We are b1os.life is our website, feel free to go out there, there's a reach us page and send us a note and let us know what you're interested in. Or if you're interested in getting on our waiting list and for individual users, and you want to put your information out there for us, please send it to us, we'll get you on our waiting list. But the most important thing I want to do is share a thought of self care. We've all been through a lot especially coming out of this last year with COVID and some countries still aren't out of it yet. But we've all gone through an incredible amount. A lot of people have lost family members, friends, people in their circle, and it's been hard, there has been nothing easy about what we've all been through as a world right? So I always tell people, make sure you're taking care of yourself, right it'll often be the weekend. put on our superhero coat coat everyday UK our cake brother everyday we get up and we go out in the world, right? Often we don't pay attention to those signs of ourselves. And then before you know it, you know people get burnout, people get depressed people are, are falling into very unfortunate situations and their mental health, they start to lose a sense of well being overall and so take care of yourselves you know, if you need to talk to someone, reach out to someone, find someone you can talk to, even if you don't trust someone that's close to you there are there there are opportunities, there are many organisations, even crew that are that are there that you can talk to, and get the right help. Your life is important. Everybody's here for a reason. There are no extra lives here on this Earth walking. So my hope is that people will truly take time to take a break every now and then, reflect, I wish I would have done more of that when I was younger, but truly reflect on life and figure out even if it's a day to day kind of lesson to learn to reflect, right? What did I do that I wish I could have done better, right? I do that every day. I do that every night. And just think healthy, mentally you know, because our mental health is so important. Be kind with what you say not only to others, but to yourself as well. I have to always say to my kids growing up that kindness and courage will take care of your life, so make sure that we're just being kind not only to others, but to ourselves as well, because our words are powerful.
Claire 41:30
Thank you so much. I think you couldn't have you know, say that even in a better way. I really agree with you and I fully support you know, take care of yourself first before you do anything. Because if you're not well, you know, it will obviously spill out around you. And you know, you never know what consequences that can have. So thank you so much for those words, and I look forward to staying in touch with you.
Mary 41:50
Thank you so much. It's been such a pleasure to be here with you today. I appreciate the invitation.
Claire 41:59
That was episode 16. A Conversation with Mary Carbajal. Mary is truly a visionary entrepreneur. She's harnessing technology to create groundbreaking innovation in healthcare, bringing more transparency in the sharing of personal health data. If you're interested to learn about B1OS work in healthcare systems and services for your organisation, you can just send an inquiry through their website at b1os.life - You will also find the link in the show notes. Thank you so much for tuning in today and listening to this new episode, I appreciate you taking the time. Make sure you sign up for our newsletter, so you can stay informed about all our activities. We also look forward to continuing engaging with you on all our social media platforms. Simply follow us on Facebook at Narratives of Purpose on Instagram at narrativesofpurpose_podcast, and on LinkedIn at Narratives of Purpose Podcast. If you like our show, do share it with your friends, family or colleagues. And leave us a review wherever you listen to your podcasts. Join me again next week for the final episode of this special textbook. I will discuss women in tech and more specifically African women in tech with my next guest. Until then, take care of yourself, stay well and stay inspired.