HIT Like a Girl Pod: Empowering Women in Health IT

In this episode, Kat McDavitt interviews Dr. Cerise Elliott, the Program Director for the Clinical Interventions and Diagnostics branch of the Division of Neuroscience at the National Institute on Aging.

Dr. Elliot tells us about her one big thing: increasing diversity and representation and research and she talks about how having the courage and cold-calling local universities as a high school, sophomore in Omaha, put her on the path to completing her Ph.D. in neuroscience.

Our very own Grace Vinton had the great opportunity to chat with Dr. Esther Kim on this episode of HITea today! 

From academic to registered dietician, to ACO program director, Dr. Esther Kim is now the Executive Director of Digital Health Innovation at Mass General Brigham. She leads a new team accelerating innovative healthcare technology pilots across the health system. As a leader in healthcare digital transformation, Esther shares with us the types of digital health technologies that have made a strong impact on their health system and innovations that make her hopeful for the future (hint, true AI, and more). She shares with us the relationship between new payment models and technology adoption to improve patient access to information. Esther strongly believes in the importance and promise of whole-person care and the industry is lucky to have her leading the charge!

In this episode, Joy chats with Angela Lanning, COO, Informatics and Technology Services at Premier. She's responsible for their product strategy and operations, which includes implementations, training, customer support, and product delivery. Premier aggregates data from multiple systems, cleans and normalizes it, applies risk adjustment, and then presents it back to customers so they can see their performance. They also help bring together hundreds of hospitals to help them strategize how to improve their performance on a much larger scale.

In this episode, Joy sits down with Rory Stanton, CEO at Aila Health, which is an AI-enabled health management platform that empowers patients with complex autoimmune diseases to receive personalized health at home. Her work helps these patients understand and manage their symptoms with online education, supportive communities, and holistic care from board-certified physicians.

We met Rory through the HITLAB NYC femtech initiative.

In this episode, recorded at HIMSS22, Joy sits down with Amy Conner to talk about her career journey in healthcare. From helping to incorporate the HPV test into women's annual screenings to identify more patients developing cervical cancer to working to introduce new clinical quality measures to identify people with uteruses who may be at risk of having a spontaneous, preterm birth. Amy is also a mom to three sons who are figuring out through her example that women's health issues affect men too.

In this episode, Joy chats with Hila Goldman-Aslan, the CEO and Co-founder of DIA Imaging Analysis, a women-led organization, based out of Israel. Her work focuses on ultrasounds, which we typically associate with babies. However, ultrasounds can look at the heart, liver, lungs, and much more. Hila's company centers its attention on the cardiac and bladder ultrasound space and leverages AI to help make user analysis of ultrasound images smarter and more accurate. This helps take the subjectivity out of the ultrasound analysis process, giving more time back to clinicians and healthcare providers.

In this episode, Joy chats with Alana McGolrick, Chief Nursing Officer at PeriGen, a perinatal decision support system. Their AI-powered early warning system gets applied to the laboring patient and helps read the fetal heart events, trends, uterine activity, progress in labor and also helps to graph and trend the maternal vital signs, which helps clinicians at the bedside with decision making related to the patient.

Her work is focused on reducing preventable maternal and newborn deaths using technology and AI to support labor and delivery activities. In this conversation, she shares how the PeriGen Vigillence product removes the bias that a doctor or nurse might have when looking at the mom or the fetal heartbeat by providing objective assessments.

In this episode, recorded at HIMSS22, Joy sits down with Anna Basevich, the VP of Enterprise Partnerships at Arcadia. She speaks our love language by helping healthcare organizations aggregate and use data to improve population health. There's magic in showing stakeholders close-to-real-time data on performance metrics that matter to them. One example is closing care gaps in breast cancer screenings and then showing the organization how to engage the population that needs support.

Brilliant! Impactful!

In this episode, Joy chats with Stephanie Hillmann, the Senior Executive and Principal Owner of Prairiewood Consulting, based out of Seattle. She and Joy had a heartfelt conversation that touched on family dynamics, supporting the mental health of our youth, working to eliminate gender bias, and calling for more love and empathy in healthcare. Overall, not only does she have a wealth of knowledge, but she's also happy to share it.

Stacy Hurt is probably best known as one of the fiercest patient advocates in healthcare. But she's so much more than that. She's a patient engagement consultant, survivorship activist, digital health strategist, and keynote speaker. As an award-winning pharma executive who lives as a healthcare consumer every day, she is also a caregiver for her intellectually and developmentally disabled son as well as a stage four colorectal cancer survivor herself.

In this episode, she shares her story and best advice.