When Robin Wiener, Get Real Health’s President and Founding Partner, was a young girl in Willimantic, Connecticut, school authorities dismissed her chances of success after concluding that she was too slow to learn anything. Thankfully she had a spitfire of a mother, who pushed and fought until Robin was tested and got the help she needed for her dyslexia and speech problems. School never came easy for Robin, but her family’s support and work ethic resulted in positive attitude that has served her well in her career and in her role as a wife and mom.
In this “Working Woman” interview with WJLA’s Alison Starling, Robin discusses how the devastation of Hurricane Katrina led her, along with partners Mark Heaney and Jason Harmon, to create Get Real Health as a way to provide patients with technology to monitor their health. A turning point for her was this past summer when her own 11 year old son was unexpectedly diagnosed with Type I diabetes. By using Get Real Health’s InstantPHR™ tools to monitor his blood sugar, she could easily track his levels in real time. “All of a sudden,” she says, “it was not just for somebody else. It was for me and it was for him. It hit home just how important InstantPHR™ is.”
Robin has never forgotten the struggles she had as a student and offers this sound advice, “Believe in yourself and know that you can accomplish anything with hard work and imagination.”