The Rebel With a Cause: Alexandra Drane’s Mission to Reshape Healthcare
by Heidi Happonen
In the world of healthcare innovation, Alexandra Drane has spent decades challenging the healthcare industry to embrace what she calls “the unmentionables”— the real-life challenges that profoundly impact health and wellness (and life) for most people but rarely make it into medical charts.
“Health is really just a different term for humanity,” Drane explains, reflecting on her career trajectory. The daughter of a tech entrepreneur father, a Quaker activist mother, and a tax CPA “bonus-dad,” Drane grew up in Lexington, Massachusetts, with divergent but equally powerful models of how to change the world.
After studying at Tufts University, Drane initially resisted healthcare as a career path. “Healthcare is boring,” she remembers telling her mother after being assigned to a healthcare case in her first job as a consultant. “I only knew tech – I was curious about retail, travel, automotive or banking,” she said. Yet within days of that first healthcare case, she was captivated by healthcare’s essential connection to the human experience.
A human-centered focus within healthcare would become Drane’s hallmark as she launched a series of groundbreaking ventures.
Her first major venture, NewMed, created a device that tracked medication usage for asthma inhalers. Despite promising early results and a plan for placement in CVS pharmacies, the company and its license on the device was sold before its full impact could be measured. “It’s gorgeous to be revolutionary,” Drane reflects, “but you also need to know that if there is a market structure in place that allows people – or systems – to purchase things in a way that they feel comfortable with, you can’t blow it all up.”
The hard-earned wisdom of each of her next ventures informed her fourth, Eliza, which sought to revolutionize health outreach through automated phone calls that somehow maintained genuine human connection. One of the secrets? Drane herself recorded the calls rather than using professional voice talent. “That sounds so unprofessional,” a highly respected physician advisor told her after hearing her recordings. But it was precisely that human “unprofessional” warm voice that made it a success.
“The Unmentionables”
It was through Eliza that Drane began collecting data on what really prevents people from engaging with healthcare. When asked why they hadn’t pursued recommended screenings, people confessed real-life struggles: caring for parents with Alzheimer’s, fearing job loss, going through divorce. This insight sparked “the unmentionables” movement, expanding the definition of health to include life circumstances, including caregiver stress, financial stress, relationship stress, workplace stress, all with the data-driven argument that “when life goes wrong, health goes wrong.”
Personal Loss and a New Mission
Drane’s professional path has been intertwined with profound personal challenges. When her sister-in-law, Rosaria ‘Za’ Vandenberg, was diagnosed with glioblastoma at 32, Drane witnessed firsthand how the healthcare system’s single-minded focus on treatment can overshadow quality of life.
“Instead of lying in a clinical hospital bed, awaiting visits from doctors, surviving all the poking and prodding and testing and treating that comes with a terminal diagnosis, we should have snuck her home and built her the most perfect of beds outside in the sun – so she could delight in her delicious 2 ½ year old daughter, Alessia, racing around her on the lawn, or inhaling every bit of every moment with her snuggled on her lap,” Drane says with lingering heartbreak.
This experience, coupled with the contrast between her own family’s openness to talking about (and supporting) end-of-life wishes and her husband’s family’s reluctance to discuss such matters, led Drane to launch Engage with Grace, promoting essential conversations about end-of-life preferences long before crisis hits. “The goal needs to be knowing how to live our best days until our last – and this is a conversation we need to be having early – and often… and, believe it or not, there can be joy in the sharing. Our legacy – how we are remembered – what we leave behind – it really does matter… and the time to help shape that is NOW. For anyone, and everyone.”
In her quest to escape her professed “bubble of privilege,” and to better understand the communities she aimed to serve, Drane took the unorthodox step of working as a Walmart cashier for eighteen months. “Every person who comes to Walmart, who works at Walmart, we are all way more alike than different. I fell in love with everybody I worked with, everyone who came through my line. I met champion after champion of humanity there,” she said.
“Every person who comes to Walmart, who works at Walmart, we are all way more alike than different. I fell in love with everybody I worked with, everyone who came through my line. I met champion after champion of humanity there,” she said.
Her Own Health Crisis
Even as she immersed herself in others’ struggles, Drane was quietly managing her own health crisis – a brain tumor that would eventually require surgery. The procedure temporarily robbed her of basic abilities: she couldn’t recognize numbers, couldn’t find words, opened doors into her face due to spatial disorientation. When she rushed back to work too quickly, she began experiencing seizures, culminating in a grand mal event that forced her to finally heed medical advice about self-care.
Through it all, Drane’s focus remained steadfast on others, particularly unpaid caregivers – those family members, friends, and neighbors providing critical support without recognition. This passion, combined with all the insights from previous work, culminated in her current venture, ARCHANGELS, which identifies caregivers who often don’t recognize themselves in that role and connects them with resources they never knew existed.
“Unpaid caregivers don’t know they’re in this role,” Drane explains. “In their mind, they’re just a son, just a daughter, just a neighbor, just a friend.” Her eyes light up as she describes the importance of an approach that’s “aspirational and strength-based because unpaid caregivers aren’t sitting around feeling sorry for themselves – they don’t have the time!! They don’t want your pity, and they’re not focused on themselves – they’re solely focused on the humans they’re caring for.”
“Unpaid caregivers don’t know they’re in this role. In their mind, they’re just a son, just a daughter, just a neighbor, just a friend.”
In one moment during her work hosting a national ad campaign for Prudential, a decorated Marine told her something unforgettable: “Going to war is easy because all you have to worry about is dying. But then you come back here with all these other responsibilities of life… that’s hard.” For Drane, it was another transformative moment confirming the unrecognized challenges of caregiving…. and the importance of telling those stories with grace, with respect, with beauty.
Today, while fielding urgent calls from organizations of every type worrying over funding cuts for support programs, Drane embodies the very resilience she celebrates in others. “That’s what caregivers do,” she says. “They just keep going even when inside they’re not sure they can. But they do. Unpaid caregivers – they never take a break. They can’t.”
Drane once joked about caregivers going on strike to demonstrate their essential role in society. “If unpaid caregivers went on strike, the whole country would shut down,” she says. “But unpaid caregivers wouldn’t do that. Why? Because they care. They’re never going to not care.”
The same could be said about Alexandra Drane herself, a visionary who has transformed personal and professional challenges into a lifelong mission to make healthcare more human, one unmentionable conversation at a time.
