HIT Like a Girl Pod: Empowering Women in Health IT

In this episode, we speak with Dr. Natasha Ramontal, Digital Health Strategist – Community Outcomes, North America at HIMSS.

To say she is an accomplished, passionate professional with a huge heart and gift for making a large-scale impact, would be an understatement.

Her professional experience spans from the healthcare frontlines to executive leadership. Prior to healthcare, Dr. Ramontal spent more than 10 years managing global projects for governments, multilateral agencies, NGOs, and the private sector. She has successfully managed complex humanitarian assistance programs aimed at improving social and economic conditions in the U.S., the Caribbean, Central America, Africa, and Eurasia. Dr. Natasha Ramontal speaks English, Jamaican Patois, and Elementary Russian.

In this episode, Grace Vinton interviews Beth Andersen, President of Anthem Blue Cross. Beth oversees the management of Anthem’s commercial business and strategy in California, working collaboratively with local and state elected officials to help transform health care. Beth and Grace discuss Anthem’s continued journey toward value-based care and what new technology the health plan is implementing to make a difference in this initiative.

In this episode of HITeaWithGrace, Grace Vinton chats with Danielle Grasso, Senior Product Manager at Force Therapeutics, a provider-driven digital care management platform primarily for orthopedics and musculoskeletal care that helps patients recover from injury or surgery at home.

 Collecting patient-reported outcome measures (PROMS) can lead to greater reimbursement under many value-based care initiatives. Danielle talks with us about the challenges of adoption and the benefits of a well-designed tool for virtual physical therapy to help with PROMS. She also dives into adaptive patient education and the variety of protocols that trigger ongoing patient engagement. We learn more about what factors are important in driving patient engagement on digital health platforms in this new era of care.

In this episode, we sit down with Dipanwita Das, CEO of Sorcero. As the annual volume of scientific literature continues to increase exponentially—with some 2,000,000 articles published across 30,000 peer-reviewed journals a year—subject-matter experts (SMEs) at life science enterprises face the herculean task of analyzing massive amounts of medical content to find the passages relevant to their products.

Sorcero is the leader in Language Intelligence (LI) and its platform streamlines scientific literature analysis for subject matter experts so that they can spend more time on higher-value tasks by saving time, money and being more accurate with data.

In this episode, Grace Vinton sits down with Sheila Talton, President, and CEO of Gray Matter Analytics. 

Sheila is a tech and health IT veteran who is passionate about the use of technology to close gaps in care to ensure high-quality care for all patients. Her company has developed an advanced analytics platform that healthcare providers and insurers are using to accelerate the transition to value-based care models and improve health equity and outcomes.

In this episode, Grace Vinton sits down with Sheeza Hussain, Chief Commercial Officer of Biofourmis, a Boston-based global leader in digital therapeutics and virtual care that powers personalized predictive care. 

Sheeza is passionate about virtual care and the ability to connect patients of all ages to care regardless of their location. In this conversation, Sheeza describes how Biofourmis’ remote patient management and virtual care solutions are making it possible for patients to receive acute, post-acute, and chronic condition care in their own homes. Virtual care is now continuous, predictive, and far more engaging than it used to be. Sheeza also shares how she overcame challenges in two male-dominated fields—computer engineering and health IT—and continues to conquer new obstacles in a rapidly changing industry through passion, hard work, and support from family and friends.

In this episode, we hear from Cynthia Church, Chief Strategy Officer of Xealth.

Xealth’s platform enables physicians and care teams to easily order and monitor digital tools – everything including patient education articles and videos, remote patient monitoring devices, shared decision-making tools and questionnaires, traditional smartphone apps patients need to download, and even services requiring patient enrollment.

"We can tell what's been sent, what's been opened. What are patients engaging with? We can bring that data back to the EHR. We can present dashboards from third-party vendors direct within the patient record so that people don't have to go back and forth."

In this bonus episode, Grace Vinton interviews Elise Kohl-Grant, Chief Information Officer at Innovative Management Solutions NY

Elise talks with us about the uphill battle mental health systems have experienced in regards to interoperability and the type of data that is most impactful for health systems to track. She also identifies gaps in care that are being closed now using data and analytics in the behavioral health arena and gives meaningful advice to other mental health systems on this new and challenging-to-predict interoperability, data, and analytics journey.

In this episode, Grace Vinton speaks with Angie Franks, CEO of ABOUT Healthcare. 

In addition to the important lessons she’s learned as a healthcare leader, Franks discusses how it's important now more than ever for hospitals and health systems to optimize access to care by leveraging technology to improve visibility into resources available to patients. ABOUT Healthcare is a leading provider of access and orchestration solutions that empower health systems to operate as one connected network of care.

In this episode, we hear from Rhonda Collins, DNP, RN, FAAN, Chief Nursing Officer for Vocera. Dr. Collins is responsible for working with nursing leadership groups globally to increase their understanding of Vocera solutions, share clinical best practices, and bring their specific requirements to Vocera's product and solutions teams.