HIT Like a Girl Pod: Empowering Women in Health IT

In this episode, we talk with Dr. Nada Elbuluk who is a board-certified dermatologist and associate professor at the USC Keck School of Medicine, Department of Dermatology. She also the Director of Clinical Impact for Visual Dx, a clinical decision support system designed to enhance diagnostic accuracy with a focus on how skin conditions look on different colored skin, which leads to more patient safety and improved health equity. 

Today's guest is Holly Hockemeier, Regional Vice President for Healthcare Provider Solutions at Nuance Communications. Her work helps reduce physician burnout through liberating providers from the keyboard. In this episode we talk about deep machine learning AI, speech to text technology, and how the purpose principles at Nuance makes them wired to win. Holly and Joy got along really well and shared some surprising ways COVID made us feel more human.

Jody DeVere, CEO of AskPatty has been breaking down barriers for women in a male-dominated automotive industry for most of her career. Not only does she serve as a mentor for countless women, offering expert car advice, but she also helped create the Certified Female Friendly car buying experience, a program that trains men at car dealerships and other auto-related shops how to communicate more effectively (and respectfully) with their women clientele. Jody served as a mentor for us on our #HITtheTrails journey and in this episode, she shares her best career advice with our listeners.

The InterSystems internship program interviews newcomers to determine which projects best align with their personality and goals. That's how Jess Jowdy, Manager of Healthcare Sales Engineering found her job as a technical liaison between clients and internal colleagues at InterSystems. If it wasn't for being pointed in this direction, she probably would have become a librarian. In this episode, Jess talks with us about the value of getting broad career experiences that can applied in surprising ways as well as not being afraid to take risks throughout your professional journey.

As the SVP for Performance and Analytics for Cotiviti, Rachael Jones leads advanced analytics teams that focus on medical costs, provider economics, network management, and value-based care. Her work looks at a continuum of data to see how poverty, food scarcity, having a place to live and access to healthcare plays into the risk and cost of care itself. In this episode, she talks about aligning incentives around value in healthcare and what it takes to create sustaining change that will stand the test of time.

Stress is a driver of health challenges. The more stress we experience, the more it impacts our health. In this episode, Dr. Juliette McClendon, clinical psychologist and Director of Medical Affairs at Big Health discusses the impact of discrimination related stress on racial and ethnic health disparities. Her work focuses on providing safe and effective non-drug therapies for mental health, specifically for sleep and anxiety. She talks about personal, social and systemic interventions that we can take to better manage the stressors in our lives.

Didi Davis, VP, Informatics, Conformance & Interoperability at The Sequoia Project, has journeyed through 30 years of the health information technology landscape trying to improve healthcare standards so that we can have ubiquitous exchange of information when and where it's needed. In this episode she shares a lifetime of efforts she's made to move the needle toward interoperability.

Eileen Achacoso, VP Operations for New York Healing Arts Institute and Director at Large for NY State HIMSS Chapter worked as a nurse in NYC hospitals during the height of COVID. In this episode, she opens up about how that experience changed her perspective on public health and the social determinants that lead people to hospital in the first place. She works diligently to ensure that nurses voices are heard throughout the healthcare ecosystem.

In this bonus episode, Kathryn Ayers Wickenhauser, Director of Communications for Direct Trust interviews Lisa Bari, Interim CEO for Civitas. Both are mission-driven women leaders who when they see something wrong, want to make it right. The concept of living with intention shows up in their career choices and we love to see it! Listen to them geek out about health equity, the digital divide, and the future they'd like to see. Take a listen!

Kathleen Aller, Director of Healthcare Market Strategy at InterSystems is responsible for telling stories about how to turn scientific data into something people care about. From population health around the world, to the evolution of health IT, Kathleen shares her wealth of knowledge. Although her career path was not linear, she thinks she would make her eight-year-old self proud. Outside of work, she makes an effort to transform the world with flowers. We love that about her!