HIT Like a Girl Pod: Empowering Women in Health IT

In this special episode, Joy sits down with each of the speakers from the inaugural S.O.A.R. Conference, presented by Bluebird Leaders in Portsmouth, New Hampshire. The event was created to support advancing women in health IT, which is a theme near and dear to our HIT Like a Girl pod hearts.

A variety of topics were covered, ranging from the importance of personal branding, self-advocacy, measuring DEI, reframing failure into opportunity, making friends with the problem you’re trying to solve, and much more. We learned from industry experts and a very special tech-savvy teen. Enjoy!

On this episode, Joy talks with Amy Moy, Co-CEO and Chief External Affairs Officer, at Essential Access Health. Amy leads the organization's federal and state policy efforts, strategic communications activities, and patient education and consumer awareness initiatives.

Amy and Joy have known each other for more than 20 years. Amy helped organize a group of women from the Bay Area to attend the 2004 March for Women's Rights in Washington, D.C. to sound the alarm for the potential for Roe vs Wade to be overturned, which happened earlier this year.

Amy shares how her own journey to motherhood was shaped by having a choice in her family planning and expresses how her daughter's generation brings her hope. Take a listen!

From nurse to informaticist to Chief Clinical Transformation Officer, in this episode of HITea with Grace, Cindy Gaines discusses the career journey that led her to her current position at Lumeon, a care orchestration platform. 

Cindy shares with us her experience on the front lines of nursing and highlights the barriers to technology implementation and the healthcare industry’s many challenges and need for care orchestration now more than ever. With clinician and nurse burnout at an all-time high, can technology and automation realistically help?

On this episode of HIT Like a Girl, Grace Vinton talks with Anna Dover, PharmD, director of Product Management at FDB (First Databank), about her prescription for combatting the epidemic of alert fatigue that contributes to the industrywide problem of clinician stress and burnout. Dr. Dover tells us how to flip the script on medication decision support to eliminate the noise, increase patient centricity and improve safety. 

The bottom line? Medication alerts need to get more relevant, meaningful, and actionable. Dr. Dover tells us how. Stay tuned!

We are excited to welcome Dr. Sonya Sloan to the podcast to talk about innovation and empowerment. She’s a traveling orthopedic surgeon, a locum tenens physician, an author, a speaker, and a mother. In her work across the U.S. for more than a decade, she has seen and treated just about everything. 

She was the first African American female intern in general surgery and the first African American female orthopedic surgery resident at the Baylor College of Medicine in Houston. There are only 6% of women in orthopedic surgery and there are less than 100 African American women orthopedic surgeons in the country. This is around 0.7% of the 30,000 orthopedic surgeons currently practicing.

Dr. Sloan currently serves the indigenous community at the Indian Health Service in New Mexico and shares her wisdom with us about what this community faces each day and where digital health could realistically fit in. She also sees great potential in the role that Virtual Reality (VR) headsets can play in improving orthopedic education. Thanks for joining us, Dr. Sloan!

When life throws you a curveball, it can be hard to know what to do next. For many of us, our mental and emotional health is closely linked to our sense of purpose. When the things we thought mattered fall to the wayside, it can be a major blow to our mental well-being.

In this bonus episode, Kat McDavitt sits down with Natanya Wachtel about how to navigate a personal crisis when you're expected to be at your peak professional performance.

Natanya is the Founding Partner of New Solutions Network, which includes The New Solutions Factory, a customer-behavior strategy group, and the Co-Founder of evrmore.io, an AI-powered app+platform for GenZ mental wellness.

To create a more diverse and inclusive tech world, we need to inspire and empower the next generation of female role models to pursue and develop their careers in technology and become innovators, leaders, and entrepreneurs.

Rebecca Woods, Founder of Bluebird Tech Solutions and Bluebird Leaders is on a mission to do just that. In this episode, Joy and Rebecca talk about the lack of diversity in IT and computer science fields, and what she's doing to change that. Bluebird Leaders is hosting the inaugural SOAR Conference for women in health IT, where the agenda has been curated to inspire attendees to become agents for positive change.

Register to attend before September 30 and save 10% with the promo code: HITLAG

Sobha Pisharody, Ph.D, is the Chief Strategy and Product Officer at InformedDNA, a genomics company.

The company has built its expertise around understanding complex genomics, understanding the clinical outcomes, matching up which patients should get, which drug or which tests, and helping both patients and payers through that journey of getting to the right medication or the right treatment for the right patients.

In this episode, Joy and Sobha talk about how, when, and why patients should broach this subject with their doctors, and how this might change in a post-Roe world.

Actionable, real-time, and precise data has the potential to improve countless inefficiencies that we see across the industry, and Mary Lantin, President and Chief Operating Officer at Diameter Health has made a career out of putting healthcare data to work. Mary speaks with us about the value of upcycled, clean, data across the care continuum, her journey that led her to Diameter Health, and how Availity’s recent acquisition of Diameter Health will help reduce provider administrative burnout and improve payer-provider collaboration. Thanks for joining us, Mary! 

In this episode, Joy sits down with Erica Olenski Johansen.

Erica is a master community builder, healthcare innovation advisor, and perhaps most importantly, she's a caregiver to a son with cancer. She's also the Founding Executive Director of August's Artists, a nonprofit organization that facilitates a simple activity during a family's challenging healthcare experience - coloring on the hospital room door window with crayons.

August's Artists helps pediatric healthcare patients and their families commemorate their hospital-door artwork as a way to celebrate some of the most formative and impactful moments in life. Listen in as she shares her journey.