RYAN PHELAN is the Executive Director of Revive and Restore, a project within The Long Now Foundation, with a mission to provide deep ecological enrichment through extinct species revival. She currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Personal Genome Project, which aims to sequence and publicize the complete genomes and medical records of 100,000 volunteers, in order to enable research into personalized medicine.
Phelan was founder and former CEO of DNA Direct, which provides genetic testing services and decision support for patients, providers and health care payors. In 2010, DNA Direct became a wholly owned subsidiary of Medco Health Solutions, one of the country's largest pharmacy benefit managers.Phelan has been a strong consumer health advocate for the past 25 years, having started the first medical library for consumers in 1978. As Founding Director of Planetree, a nonprofit consumer health care organization, she helped create a national model for humanizing hospitals, and a national model for providing health information to the public, the Planetree Resource Center.
In 1995 she founded Direct Medical Knowledge (DMK). DMK was an extensive consumer health web site highly regarded for its unique content depth and innovative search interface. DMK developed proprietary software that enabled users to drill down through the most current medical literature and retrieve personalized health and medical information. As CEO of DMK, Ms. Phelan forged alliances with major medical institutions, national health care plans, publishers, and consumer groups. In 1999 WebMD, a leader in the Internet health information industry acquired Direct Medical Knowledge. DMK's content became the backbone of WebMD's consumer health site.
She was also co-founder of the ALL Species Foundation in 2002, a global science initiative to discover all life on Earth, which evolved into the Encyclopedia of Life.