HIT Like a Girl Pod: Empowering Women in Health IT

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, Je...

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 i...

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, speci...

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 voic...

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...

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...

In addition to building high caliber teams, Sally Buta, VP of Strategy and Innovation at PatientKeeper is also on a personal mission to hike to the highest point of each state. She's already conquered 46 out of 50 and had the goal of finishing them all by her 50th birthday, but the pandemic threw a wrench into her plans. In this episode, we nerd out about our relationship to expectations and how f...

As the Chief Product Officer at Cohere Health, Gina Kim's career has taken a very mission-driven approach, where she focuses on solving problems related to patient access, health in the home, and prior authorizations. In the episode, she takes the time to explain what prior authorization is in laymen’s terms and shares about her work in helping create more transparency around the patient’s best pa...

Brittany Partridge is the Virtual Care Technical Lead at UC San Diego Health and one of her claims to fame is executing a two-year telemedicine implementation plan over the course of a weekend. She is a powerhouse in all technology related to virtual care, which became a massive asset throughout the pandemic. In this episode, Brittany shares how she's leveraged her love for learning workflows in a...

The U.S. is melting pot and the healthcare system is difficult to navigate, regardless of where a patient comes from. ConsejoSano works with health plans and payers to provide healthcare information to their members in more than 30 languages and helps them be more empathetic to the cultural nuances from its member communities. It's this holistic approach that creates a meaningful, ongoing relation...

Alex MacLeod works as the Director of Healthcare Commercial Initiatives now, but she has actually been working at InterSystems for more than 20 years and started as an intern in Germany! Her current role involves sales and engineering, where she gets a nice mixture of both technical and sales-y customer-facing experience. In this episode, Alex share how becoming a mom has - to her own surprise - h...

Kat McDavitt continues the Lady Boss Interview Series this week, with her sister, Liz Carden, who works as the Director for Strategic Planning at Intouch Solutions. They talk about loving what you do, how showing emotions can be a superpower, and how important it is to find people in your community to have collaborative discussions with -- even, and perhaps, especially if you don't agree on everyt...

It’s sister week! In this episode, Joy (and Shereese) sit down with Joy’s big sister, Jenny. Jenny Rios works as an Owner's Representative - or a liaison between home owners, architects, and construction managers. Her industry is notoriously male-dominated, and she shares her strategies on how she is making change. Here's a hint: be very deliberate about who you want to do business with and what y...

Loren Deutsch is a professional educational therapist and licensed clinical social worker who has worked at the border of medical education and clinical social work for 25 years. In 2010, she founded Loren Academic Services (LAS), an educational services company that specializes in Coaching, Curriculum Development, and Consulting for students, residents, faculty, and medical centers. In today's ep...

If we get our appointments more quickly, we can get the questions we have answered more immediately, outcomes will improve on both sides. As the founder and CEO of Botco.ai, Rebecca Clyde works to make healthcare less complicated through creating a simple, yet sophisticated digital front door for healthcare providers.

On this bonus episode of HIT Like a Girl pod, we share a conversation between two health IT ladybosses: Kat McDavitt and Kristin Haluch, Head of Customer Success and Operations for Bold, an agetech company bringing an evidence based fitness platform to older adults, allowing them to age in place. Kristin is also women's career empowerment coach. She has been coaching for over a decade and is passi...

As the Clinical Product Manager for InterSystems, Julie Smith is helping to ensure that health systems around the world have the information they need at their fingertips to provide better care for patients. In addition to wanting everyone to have equitable access to care, she also tells us about her two pandemic puppies.

Shutting down a major healthcare conference, telling 47,000 people to stay home, including the sitting President, and dealing with the backlash of unhappy people has been a career highlight (or, perhaps lowlight?) for these two women leaders. Karen Groppe and Terri Sanders tell us how it really went down, what they learned through the process, how they cope with high stress situations, and all tha...

Whether through making sense of the cost of care in the healthcare setting or exploring ways to isolate and layer body movements to improve her belly dancing, Tanjina Shapiro, Chief Operating Officer for Curation Health is a master at brain-teasing exercises. In this episode, she shares how her organization supports physicians in taking care of patients, where she goes for professional support, an...

The first big gathering after the pandemic, Stephanie Denvir, VP of Engagement Strategies for HIMSS, shares what to expect from the Global Conference in Las Vegas next month.

Joy and Shereese traveled the country to reconnect with the women in health IT as the pandemic begins to subside. When they landed at the Women's Rights National Historic Park in Seneca Falls, New York, they decided to share their experience of the HIT the Trails journey so far, through this historic lens.

On this bonus episode of HIT Like a Girl pod, we host a conversation between two health IT pros: Kat McDavitt, Principal Advisor & Public Affairs Practice Head at Innsena Communications and Mandira Singh, COO at Collective Medical. Mandira has taken a very unique career path. She was born in Nepal, studied music in India, was recruited for college in the U.S. for opera, and then became an investme...

On this bonus episode of HIT Like a Girl pod, we host a conversation between two health IT pros: Kat McDavitt, Principal Advisor & Public Affairs Practice Head at Innsena Communications and Jaime Bland, CEO of CyncHealth. Jaime worked in Qatar for eight years as an operations manager for a troop medical clinic and then was called to serve her country back at home at the Veterans Health Administrat...

On this special in-between-season episode of HIT Like a Girl pod we're calling the #Ladyboss Interview Series, we host a conversation between to bonafide health IT pros: Kat McDavitt, Principal Advisor & Public Affairs Practice Head at Innsena Communications and Angela Ammons, CEO of Clinch Memorial Hospital. Angela opens up about how not having a traditional educational background has influenced...