Tidepool’s Mission Statement
Our mission is to make diabetes data more accessible, actionable, and meaningful for people with diabetes, their care teams, and researchers.
Tidepool is an open source, not-for-profit effort to make diabetes data more accessible, actionable, and meaningful by liberating data from diabetes devices, supporting researchers, and providing great, free software to the diabetes community.
Tidepool's Core Values
1. People with diabetes own their own health data. We are stewards of that data.
We believe that people with diabetes, PwDs for short, own their health data, including therapy data collected by the devices they use. We are stewards of that data; we help to liberate it, and protect it with the utmost care and attention to privacy, accuracy, security, and usefulness.
2. We operate with openness and transparency.
As a company, we will operate openly and transparently. We will not keep secrets or hide information unless there is a good reason to do so, such as to maintain our users' privacy.
This includes things like:
Open source code
Open finances
Open project planning
Open user experience designs
Open regulatory quality system
3. Start small and iterate quickly.
We believe that the best path to safety, efficacy, usability, and functionality that matters is to start small and then iterate. For example, we may deliver a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), and then iterate based on feedback from our users in the real world.
4. Embrace regulations, and help improve them.
We operate in a highly regulated space, including FDA, HIPAA, EU and other regulations. Wherever we can, we will interpret regulations in a way that is best for PwD safety and efficacy. We will engage early and often with regulators, and work with them to embrace modern software development techniques and processes.
5. We don't have all of the answers.
As a company, we realize that we won't have all of the answers. That means that it's important for us to listen to our users, and iterate often based on their feedback. (See “Start small and iterate quickly” above.)
It also means that we will make the underlying platform of our software available to other developers and innovators, and allow our users to access their data and make it available to other applications and services.
It means that as employees, we embrace others' feedback. We admit our mistakes, are vocally self-critical, and help each other find ways to continue growing and improving over time. We put systems in place to help us improve our processes continuously.
Trust is the currency that powers every interaction on teams. Only when we trust each other can we share the candid feedback and opinions that let us be creative and successful. We give our coworkers deep visibility into how our decisions are made and easy outlets to help them give input and guide our course. When we build trust through good communication, we create an environment for better communication in the future.
We seek input from all places: from each other, from users and non-users, from industry and academia. We solicit feedback from both experts and novices. We seek out alternate, challenging and critical points of view; this helps us understand and mitigate risks, and to improve our products.
6. Always put the PwD first.
We have chosen to be a non-profit so that we can always prioritize the needs of the PwD over industry or investor priorities.
So that we can have the most impact within the diabetes community, we also generate revenue with the goal of being a self-sustainable non-profit.
7. Fight the default of exclusion.
Inequality and exclusion are the defaults of our industries (software development and medical devices). Without intentional effort, we will inherit those failings and worsen the problem. Building a diverse team is a moral imperative and we build a better business and product by bringing different perspectives to the table. We look for voices unlike our own because they are the only ones that help us grow.
8. Focus on Diabetes Software.
Tidepool is a diabetes software company, so we direct our energy on challenges specific to diabetes software, diabetes visualizations, diabetes data liberation, and diabetes data management. We leverage existing technical solutions and designs to avoid duplication of effort.