We are building tools to not only measure and prove the impact of surgical care but also to improve the safety and quality of patient care through education and training of local healthcare providers.
Our Story
Dr. Kamal is an orthopedic surgeon at Stanford University Hospital and Dr. Shapiro is an orthopedic surgeon at the University of California - San Francisco.
After years of taking overseas surgical trips, they realized that the process of taking care of patients was often unregulated, and lacked the same checklists and emphasis on patient safety and quality of care provided to patients in the United States.
Dr. Kamal and Dr. Shapiro wanted to find a way to amplify the work they do on quality care in the U.S. to improve the safety and quality of care overseas.
Their understanding of the limitations at foreign hospitals, paired with their Stanford research, uniquely positions them with the scientific knowledge and tools to create and apply new standards.
About Us
Robin Kamal MD MBA, Co-Founder
Lauren Shapiro MD MS, Co-Founder
Lauren Shapiro MD MS, Co-Founder
Rob grew up in a small town in Missouri to parents who were teachers at the local university. His parents were immigrants to the United States and made sure to expose him to the developing world early, taking trips to visit his extended family in Bangladesh every summer.
Rob took his first outreach trip at the age of 16 to the Dominican Republic and it sparked a lifelong passion for service in low resource settings . Rob has always wanted to leave the world a better place and help those who could not help themselves.
He went on to undergraduate and medical school at the University of Missouri-Kansas City, and then trained to become an orthopaedic surgeon at Brown University. He finished a trauma fellowship at Brown, before going to Duke University to train as a hand/upper extremity and microvascular surgeon. He now works at Stanford University as an orthopaedic surgeon and clinician scientist, with an expertise in measuring and improving quality of care, a topic on which he publishes extensively.
In recent years, Rob has traveled to Haiti, Nicaragua, Bolivia, Nepal, Vietnam, and Cambodia to operate on and teach about neglected upper extremity conditions, but he’s always felt that there was more he could do for the local healthcare system - the patients, the surgeons, and the hospital. This is what led him to co-found SGS.
Lauren Shapiro MD MS, Co-Founder
Lauren Shapiro MD MS, Co-Founder
Lauren Shapiro MD MS, Co-Founder
Lauren grew up in Phoenix, Arizona, where she spent most of her time playing soccer. Soccer provided a common language and community that brought people from different backgrounds together. It was initially soccer that opened her eyes to life outside of Arizona but when organized soccer ended, education and outreach trips stepped in to fill this role.
Lauren’s first two outreach trips were to a primary care clinic in Lopez Mateos, Mexico, where she helped triage clinic patients and provided translation services for the patients and physicians. Between college and medical school, Lauren spent her summer in Costa Rica leading groups of high school students on outreach trips, introducing students to service and global communities. Lauren continued her graduate studies at Stanford University for both medical school and residency.
Frustrated by the inequalities and inefficiencies of the healthcare system, she began a research focus on quality, value, and policy. Toward the end of residency, Lauren pursued multiple opportunities to deliver care in Vietnam, Cambodia, and Tanzania. It was then that she realized that the care discrepancies and fragmentation she saw in the US were magnified in lower resource settings. If she could study and improve the safety and quality of care in the United States, why couldn’t they develop systems to apply these principles in lower resource settings?