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
People with diabetes own their own health data. Period.
We believe that people with diabetes 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.
Always put people with diabetes first.
Our software is free for clinicians and people impacted by diabetes. Forever. We have chosen to be a nonprofit organization so that we can always prioritize the needs of the diabetes community over profit-maximizing investors.
Operate with openness and transparency.
As a company, we operate openly and transparently. We do not keep secrets or hide information unless there is a good reason to do so, such as to maintain our users' privacy.
Besides this Employee Handbook (which is open source), this also includes open source code, open finances and open regulatory documentation.
Engage with regulators and help improve regulations.
We operate in a highly regulated space, including FDA, HIPAA, EU and other regulations. Wherever we can, we interpret regulations in a way that is best for the safety of people with diabetes and efficacy of the products we deliver. We engage early and often with regulators, and work with them to embrace modern software development techniques and processes.
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.
Embrace the unknown.
As a company, we realize that we won't have all of the answers. We believe in listening to our users and making changes based on their feedback.
We also make the underlying platform of our software available to other developers and innovators, and allow our users to access their data through other applications and services of their choice.
Fight the default of exclusion.
Inequality and exclusion are the defaults of our industries (software development and medical devices). Without intentional effort to address these barriers to access, 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 continue to look to build a team of diverse voices because they are the only ones that help us grow.