EMEnRose Magazine

Ryan McLean

Comfort Research®, the creators of Big Joe®, has announced the new Chief Executive Officer, Ryan McLean. McLean has been on the job for four weeks now and is thrilled to be leading the future of Comfort Research.

With opportunity surrounding the company, McLean has been brought onto the team at an exciting time. Innovation within Comfort Research has been a staple since its humble beginnings, and Ryan will be helping initiate that growth through e-commerce and B2B.

"Big Joe is a fun brand with exciting new innovation on the horizon," stated McLean. 

The Co-founders Chip George and Matt Jung along with VP of People and Culture, Becky Ploeg were able to be a large part of the hiring process for Ryan. "From the first conversations with him, we felt not only would he fit into our innovation-driven culture of Find a Better Way, Expect the Best, and Do the Right Thing, but be able to build upon it," explained Jung. 

"We couldn't have found a better fit," George added. "We worked with Titus, a local recruiting agency, who uses a predictive index program that scored him at 100% perfect match for Comfort Research."

"I could sense an authentic leadership from Ryan," said Ploeg. "His commitment to culture, personable authenticity, and consumer product goods background made him a fantastic choice for Comfort Research."

McLean comes to Comfort Research with over 25 years of experience within the consumer goods industry. In addition, McLean has shown his knowledge in versatile roles and departments, from marketing, sales, brand management to, most recently, Senior Vice President.

Comfort Research has welcomed Ryan with excitement and open arms ready for the future. 

 About Comfort Research®

Based in Grand Rapids, Michigan, Co-Founders Matt Jung and Chip George began revolutionizing affordable, fun furniture from their college dorm in 1997. Comfort Research® has now sold over 25 million units, with over 100 patents and trademarks, and operates in three state-of-the-art plants with more than 275 employees across the U.S. While we're no longer using a wood chipper to shred foam, we're still committed to making products you'll love that are stylish, durable, fun and most importantly, absurdly awesome.

Smile CDR Inc. (doing business as Smile Digital Health), a leading health data and integration company, today announced it has passed an Amazon Web Services (AWS) Foundational Technical Review (FTR) and has achieved Amazon HealthLake (AHL) Connector partner status in the AWS Partner Network (APN). Healthcare organizations can expect Smile Digital Health running on AWS to provide a best-in-class data fabric platform along with the confidence that it is meeting various regulatory and compliance requirements in the U.S. and the EU when storing and sharing their sensitive health data via the platform. Smile Digital Health first announced its work with AWS in March, and this expansion represents the continual growth of that relationship.

"Our ongoing work with AWS demonstrates the deep collaboration between our companies, delivering the many benefits of the Smile Digital Health data fabric platform running in a world-class hyperscale environment. Having partner status provides our customers with substantial benefits including additional security, dependability and operational excellence," said Duncan Weatherston, Chief Executive Officer, Smile Digital Health. "Healthcare organizations — and in turn their patients — are well served by access to our scalable, high-performing, resilient and efficient data fabric platform on the leading cloud infrastructure."

The expansion and scope of work includes two key elements:

• Becoming an Amazon HealthLake (AHL) Connector Partner, demonstrating the company's ability to help transform existing healthcare data in real time into the required format, including standard Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR^®) format, so the data can be used across AHL applications and services.
   
• Passing the AWS Foundational Technical Review (FTR), which helps identify and mitigate technical risks in solutions built by independent software vendors (ISVs). Smile Digital Health's solutions were evaluated by a subset of AWS Well-Architected best practices. As part of the review, Smile Digital Health's reference architecture was approved to be deployed on Amazon Elastic Kubernetes Services (Amazon EKS), a managed container service to run and scale Kubernetes applications in the cloud or on-premises, and Amazon Aurora and Amazon Relational Database Service (Amazon RDS) for PostgreSQL to ensure a performant, cost-effective, secure and scalable solution.

"Our customers can expect Smile Digital Health to continuously meet and often exceed regulatory and compliance requirements when storing and sharing their sensitive health data via our data fabric platform. In that sense, we continue to guarantee the highest security and compliance standards," said James Agnew, Chief Technology Officer, Smile Digital Health.

Smile Digital Health's work on AWS continues to simplify the interoperability process between various data platforms, allowing for better health journey outcomes between patients, providers and health systems, and reducing information technology barriers.

About Smile Digital Health

Smile Digital Health is a health information technology company focused on delivering better global health through open standards. Our enterprise-grade, health data fabric and exchange platform fuels healthcare's digital transformation and accelerates value creation across all patient journeys at scale. Powered by our HL7® FHIR® standard-based clinical data repository (#SmileInside), our platform enables collaboration and allows organizations to ingest, transform, store, enrich, analyze, aggregate, and meaningfully share health information to power digital transformation. We prepare healthcare providers, payers, researchers, and life sciences organizations for a connected future beyond legacy systems, adding new value through intelligent use of information and ultimately delivering better patient outcomes. We help healthcare organizations confidently #ChooseOpenStandards with the goal of #BetterGlobalHealth. For more information, visit SmileDigitalHealth.com.