Equalize Health (formerly D-Rev)

Equalize Health, a nonprofit product company, believes all people deserve products that can improve their lives regardless of their gender, age, or purchasing capacity. We develop products that improve the health and increase the incomes of people at the base of the pyramid (BOP) – ensuring that no matter where you were born you have access to the world’s best technologies. Equalize Health drives the whole design process: identifying the need, designing a solution, delivering the product to target users, and scaling the solution to achieve impact. We don’t design products for poor people – we design world-class, affordable devices for people who need them.

We currently have several products in development, but our priorities are newborn jaundice (which our Brilliance family of products treat using phototherapy), newborn respiratory distress (our neonatal CPAP device is coming soon), telementoring (through our ECHO program), nutrition, and maternal health.

Equalize Health develops solutions to address the needs of people in the developing world that are frequently overlooked or undervalued. Too often, people concerned with international development or global health direct their efforts toward solving the world’s biggest health problems and neglect diseases like jaundice – which are so easily treatable that it is easy to ignore the access gap that leaves nearly six million babies at risk each year.

And in the West, we often think that excess supply, such as overstock or used prosthetic legs, will be helpful when donated to low-income amputees without realizing the harm it will cause. Donated devices were not designed for the context where they end up, receiving institutions often aren’t educated on device specifics, and replacement parts are near impossible to come by. Equalize Health designs sustainable, tailor-fit solutions to these problems.

Equalize Health designs and develops products that have the potential to create measurable, data-driven, positive impact on people at the BOP. Our products are currently in use in over 70 countries, including Colombia, Ecuador, Fiji, Guatemala, India, Indonesia, Iraq, Liberia, Malawi, Pakistan, Philippines, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Tanzania, and Uganda.

At Equalize Health, we design and deliver affordable products that address needs in the developing world. But we don’t stop at creating products; we drive the entire design process from need-finding, prototyping, and design to deliver, manufacturability, scale up, and impact assessment.

We work to ensure that our innovations are not only designed well, but that they reach their target users. At Equalize Health we design not just for our intended end-users, but for every person that our products touch. Our patients get the mobility they need, nurses learn to be savvy in operating our phototherapy devices, and hospitals and clinics purchase our products at a reasonable value. We also view patients’ families, service technicians, purchasing decision makers, and even salespeople and manufacturing staff as important customers whose needs need to be considered in the design process.

Equalize Health believes a market-based approach to product development is challenging but critical. We know it is not enough to just design a product, but to ensure it reaches people. To do this we offer products for purchase – not relying on donations. After a product is ready for sale, we leverage established local markets, working closely with suppliers, manufacturers and distributors to ensure that our products are fully integrated into delivery channels that bring them to places where they are needed.

Our Neonatal Jaundice line of products, Brilliance, became commercially available in India in November 2012 and has since taken off around the world. More than 4,000 units have been installed worldwide; we estimate that more than 900,000 babies have been treated with Brilliance.

To scale the first version of the ReMotion Knee in 2015, we partnered with the JaipurFoot Organization, the largest supplier and distributor of prosthetics in India, for clinical fitting and critical user feedback. JaipurFoot currently uses ReMotion v1 to treat its patients in 22 clinics in India and has fitted over 5,000 amputees. ReMotion retails at $80, or 1/10th of the price of comparable knee joints. It has recently been spun off to Range of Motion Project (ROMP), a leading prosthetics not-for-profit, for increased impact.

Equalize Health is composed of a world-class, talented team of engineers, designers, and business professionals. Krista Donaldson, Ph.D., is our founder and former CEO. She has driven innovation for over 15 years in product design, engineering, and international development. Because of her leadership of Equalize Health, she has been named to the Silicon Valley 40 Under 40, Fast Company’s Co. Design 50 Designers Shaping the Future, and the Public Interest Design 100. She was also a TEDxStanford, TEDWomen, and a Clinton Global Initiative speaker, 2010-2012 Rainer Arnhold Fellow, and 2011 Pop! Tech Social Innovation Fellow.



Equalize Health is structured as a non-profit, but operates product delivery similarly to a for-profit technology firm. Equalize Health relies on grant funding and earned revenue from product sales through licensing and royalty agreements to cover R&D, design, and development costs. Once a product launches commercially, it sells and scales profitably through build-in profit margins without outside support. We re-invest profits from product sales in R&D for new products and impact assessment

Since Dr. Donaldson took over the leadership and management of Equalize Health (formerly D-Rev) in 2009, we have achieved significant progress in meeting our goals and intended impact. In 2012, we successfully launched a life-changing medical device on the market, Brilliance, and we launched another top-quality product, the ReMotion Knee v3, to market in 2015.

Since the launch of Brilliance, more than 900,000 babies have been treated with the phototherapy device; more than 800,000 babies have been treated who otherwise who would not have received effective treatment; and over 13,000 newborn deaths and disabilities have been averted. We have also developed the ReMotion Knee v3 for global prosthetic markets. Through our partnership with JaipurFoot Organization, we have fit more than 5,000 amputees with the ReMotion Knee v1 in India, Sri Lanka, Iraq, Ecuador, Senegal and Fiji. Of these patients, 79% are still wearing their prostheses compared to 65% in a patient study on a previous knee model used by JaipurFoot; and 95% of patients report no failures in ReMotion Knees.

Coming soon, we will launch our nCPAP (neonatal continuous positive air pressure) device, which will ensure that high-quality newborn RDS treatment is within most countries' capacity to implement and save more newborn babies' lives.

Equalize Health’s innovative mission, products, results and leadership have been recognized by a number of leading organizations in the field. Equalize Health (formerly D-Rev) was named 2014 World Economic Forum Technology Pioneer and as the 25th “World’s Most Innovative Companies” by Fast Company in 2013. Our ReMotion Knee won the Proto Labs Cool Idea Award in 2012, the Stanford BASES Challenge for business models that create a positive social or environmental impact, and the University of California-Berkeley Haas Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC) 2010. Comet, our portable phototherapy device, won a USAID Saving Lives at Birth award in 2012.