If you haven’t heard of Joan Sullivan Garrett or MedAire, you are in for a ride! As a flight nurse, all Joan ever wanted to do is save lives. In 1984, the loss of a young patient in the mountains of Arizona compelled her to pioneer global telemedicine – quite a feat in those days. Her book is dedicated to this little boy, Ralphie, whose passing sparked a revolution in remote travel medicine.

As an unlikely CEO, Joan found a way to connect ground-based emergency physicians to flight crews from anywhere in the world in real time, whether 36,000 feet in the air or in the middle of an ocean. This became safety net for you, the traveler, during medical emergencies. Thousands of lives have been saved and millions are safer on air, land and sea because Joan made the jump into the unknown and built a company from the ground up – a rare startup for a female in the male-dominated industries of the 1980s.