Professor Millicent Stone is the CEO and co-founder of iOWNA, a digital therapy companion supporting clinicians and patients to get the best outcome for the patient. It increases patient and professional wellbeing, and improves outcomes, while keeping all parties on track. Millie is also a practicing Consultant Physician who trained as a Clinical Epidemiologist before embarking on an MSt in Entrepreneurship at Judge Business School, University of Cambridge. During her time at Homerton College, Millie was drawn to the Changemakers programme where she became a Changemaker Ambassador and discovered how to combine her passions and skills to drive her mission to ‘enable people to live longer, healthier lives.’
Millie first had the idea for her company iOWNA in 2019 and managed to secure private funding to kick-start the business. She also received very helpful commercial advice from the Judge Business School, where she was studying an Mst in Entrepreneurship, but many of the lessons she learnt were still done the hard way - by making mistakes. Today iOWNA is a successful and growing business, most recently winning the Excellence in Digital Pathways’ award at the 2024 Health Tech News Now Awards! On top of that, Millie has her own successful podcast show ‘Live Longer’, available on Apple and Spotify.
Caption: Pictured below, Millie and her team at iOWNA
Talking about the Changemakers programme, Millie says she gained insight into effectively balancing work and life and how to really make a difference.
She comments:
“There are some amazing people in Changemakers - Alison and Soraya couldn’t have been more supportive - and there is genuine diversity. The Changemakers people were extremely inclusive and made me feel really valued. It helped me as a person and it helped me in my mission - to enable people to live healthier, longer. I specifically remember the advice they gave about how to settle down and do your essays - Alison did a session on brainstorming, how to start off an essay. These were helpful, practical tips that kept me sane and enabled me to flourish in my degree.
During my time with the Changemakers team, they asked me to do an activity. Art is good for wellbeing and I love art so I started a podcast, the ‘‘Live Longer Podcast'’, where I interviewed artists from all walks of life, all ethnicities and all backgrounds. It was a very inclusive and diverse group.”
Millie’s podcast was incredibly impactful in regards to the diverse audience it reached and it was a finalist for the Cambridge University VC’s social impact award.” Millie also received the Entrepreneurial Growth Award from Judge Business School for demonstrating considerable entrepreneurial development for all her work for Changemakers programme and her podcasts.
She is now turning the podcasts into a book, a ‘coffee table’ book, with 50 interviews about embracing art to live a better life, our future health, how medics cope with illness, digital art and therapy, art and humanity, how art can improve patients’ lives. The cover features an incredibly powerful image of a Sudanese refugee, taken by one of the podcast’s artists - Dan White. Dan is a Pulitzer prize-winning photojournalist, who has captured the essence of many people from the jazz musicians of Kansas City to Professor Stephen Hawking at Cambridge University.
Millie continues:
“The podcasts and the book - that’s my footprint for Changemakers. It was honestly a fantastic programme and I got really stuck into it during my time at Homerton - they were so interested in me and that really meant something. Changemakers seemed very impactful, meaningful and my personal experience was phenomenally good. They were phenomenally inclusive and unbelievably warm and welcoming. Alison and Soraya and all the people involved with Changemakers made it an amazing experience for me. They couldn’t have been more supportive and they couldn’t have done more.”
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Read more about iOWNA
‘Live Longer Podcast' is a series of conversations with artists, architects and creatives on bringing art, nature and healing into the mix for achieving health and wellness.
Professor Millicent A Stone
MB Bch BAO, FRCP (Edin), MSc (U of T) MSt (Cantab)
CEO and Founder iOWNA
Consultant Rheumatologist & Associate Professor of Medicine, University of Toronto
Royal Society, Entrepreneur in Residence Centre Therapeutic Innovation, University of Bath
Visiting Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship, University of Bath
