2017 most powerful women in healthcare IT: HIT vendor execs

2017 most powerful women in healthcare IT: HIT vendor execs

Health Data Management is honoring 75 of the Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT. The awards are broken into three categories: thought leaders, provider/payer executives and CIOs/IT executives. What follow is the list of CIOs/IT executives. All 75 women will be honored at The Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT conference, which will be held May 17, 2017, at the Sheraton Boston Hotel. For more information on the event, click here.

Amy Abernethy, MD

Title: Chief Medical Officer/Chief Scientific Officer and SVP, Oncology

Organization: Flatiron Health

Years in HIT: 12

Previous Positions: Director, Board of Directors, athenahealth; adjunct professor of medicine, Duke University School of Medicine; Professor of Medicine, Duke University School of Medicine, including previous positions as Associate and Assistant Professor; Director, Duke Center for Learning Health Care, Duke Clinical Research Institute; Director, Duke Cancer Care Research Program, Duke Cancer Institute.

Significant achievements: As Chief Medical Officer and Chief Scientific Officer, Abernethy leads the medical and research vision and strategy for Flatiron Health. Flatiron is a health data and technology company in New York focused on organizing cancer data and using it to accelerate research and optimize clinical care. Abernethy was an early employee at Flatiron when it was an early startup, and has been with it through its growth. Flatiron now has more than 400 employees and $313 million in funding.

Impact on HIT: Since starting her career, Abernethy has concentrated on what she calls “the bigger problems in the healthcare system,” specifically around “learning healthcare,” the bridge between research and practice where each informs the other through data. “In this way the care of an individual patient is informed by all people with similar characteristics who came before them,” she says.

Abernethy works to drive conversation at the federal level about learning healthcare – concentrating on how real-world data (often defined as patient information that goes beyond what is normally collected in clinical trials) can be used to advance cancer research.

Susan Arthur

Title: Vice President, Americas Health, Life Sciences, & Regulated Industries

Organization: DXC Technology

Years in HIT: 28

Previous Positions: Vice President and General Manager, Americas Health & Life Sciences, Hewlett Packard Enterprise; General Manager, Hewlett Packard Enterprise; General Manager (last held position), Electronic Data Systems.

Primary Achievements: Arthur grew Hewlett Packard’s Health & Life Sciences sector across industry segments and maintained the organization’s market leadership position. She spearheaded a collaborative multi-state effort in Pennsylvania to develop an award-winning software application for administering meaningful use incentive payments. Arthur has served as a member of the World Economic Forum’s Healthcare Industry Working Group, which developed a seminal white paper, Digital Transformation of Industries: Healthcare Whitepaper. Additionally, she chaired CompTia’s State and Local Government Council Executive Board and TechAmerica’s Health IT Committee.

Impact on HIT: Arthur and her team are focused on modernizing HIT to help health and life sciences clients who are embracing more collaborative, analytic, and data-oriented models to accelerate change and harness the power of technology to deliver better healthcare outcomes. Recognizing the benefits of a diverse HIT workforce, Arthur has taken deliberate steps to mentor women in leadership and women in HIT and speak to industry groups on the contributions and value of women, leadership, and HIT.

Lindy Benton

Title: CEO and president

Organization: Vyne

Years in HIT: 30

Previous Positions/Background: CEO and President, Vyne; CEO and President, MEA|NEA; Chief Operating Officer, healthcare division, The Sage Group; 15 years in various leadership positions including Vice President, General Manager, U.S. Sales and Vice President, Operations–Client Experience Organization, Cerner Corp.; Southeast healthcare division. Digital Equipment Corp.

Achievements: Benton is a speaker and activist working to mentor, support and help caregivers understand how to utilize available services to improve patient health. She has been instrumental in developing a successful community program designed to help senior members live and thrive in their homes by providing meals, transportation, healthcare services and company to those who would normally not be able to stay in their homes. She has also served for 12 years on the Foundation Board for Florida Hospital for Children, with the mission of raising funds to support the hospital’s greatest needs in serving children in the community. Benton is a Past Chapter President and a fellow with the Health Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) and serves on executive councils for several health-related committees and industry associations. She speaks regularly for health conferences such as HIMSS and was a keynote speaker for the 2016 HERe initiative, an effort hosted by the Healthcare Financial Management Association to support the professional development of women leaders in healthcare.

Impact on HIT: Benton has spent her career driving positive change by building and transforming teams through strong leadership and a singular vision. In her 15 years at Cerner, she achieved double digit revenue growth for the company while leading clinical and technical teams in the design and delivery of IT solutions to clients worldwide. Leadership opportunities at Cerner eventually opened the door to an executive role with The Sage Group. Benton joined the company as COO responsible for growing the healthcare division, where she renegotiated contracts and ultimately prepared the division for acquisition by a new investor. In 2011, Benton joined MEA|NEA, a company founded to securely exchange unstructured documentation for dental practices in support of insurance claims.

Benton led efforts to expand this platform and apply the same technology to managing unstructured data for healthcare providers. The company was renamed to Vyne in 2016 after acquiring The White Stone Group, a provider of secure healthcare communication management solutions. Benton is now leveraging the skillset and technology of the combined company to build a single platform for the secure exchange and management of patient health data. The company achieves this by capturing data through whatever means it is exchanged, centralizing it around the patient and making it available through a single access point. This resolves countless workflow and care coordination challenges for providers, ensuring relevant patient information is immediately available at the point of need.

Rebecca Cofinas

Title: Founder and CEO

Organization: AristaMD

Years in HIT: 3 years

Previous responsibilities: Corporate Vice President, Clinical Operations, Scripps Health; Chief Operating Executive, Scripps Memorial Hospital; Chief Operating Officer (last held position), Scripps Green Hospital; Senior Project Manager, Scripps Health; Senior Consultant, Arista Associates; Consultant, Diversified Health Resources; Financial Consultant, Cook County Healthcare.

Significant Achievements: Cofinas is working through her company on technology that is reducing emergency department visits and hospital admissions by 10 percent or more with the AristaMD platform. She's directing IT use that she says is decreasing the need for in-person specialty visits by more than 50 percent through the use of eConsults. There's been high provider satisfaction with AristaMD, with more than 90 percent of clients being highly satisfied and willing to recommend AristaMD to a colleague.

Impact on HIT: Driven by a vision to build technology that would empower physicians to collaborate and provide clinically superior and efficient care, Cofinas worked with a technology team to develop AristaMD. The platform addresses shortcomings in how patients are currently referred to physician specialists. Research shows that more than 50 percent of specialist referrals are unnecessary or inappropriate, and more than 20 million patients are referred to the wrong type of specialist each year. These needless visits add up to more than $10 billion in healthcare spending a year.

On the flip side of the issue, patients who live in remote areas have difficulty accessing specialty care. More than 90 percent of patients served by AristaMD are defined as the underserved.

Bridget Duffy, MD

Title: Chief Medical Officer

Organization: Vocera Communications

Years in HIT: 10

Previous Positions: Co-founder and CEO, ExperiaHealth (acquired by Vocera Communications in 2011); Chief Experience Officer, The Cleveland Clinic; Medical Director, Medtronic Foundation; · Medical Director-Hospitalist Service, Allina Health System/Abbott Northwestern Hospital.

Significant Achievements: Serving as a clinical and experience advisor, Duffy helps Vocera design the next generation of healthcare innovations that bridge communication gaps, improve care team collaboration, and address clinician well-being, resilience and joy. She's part of corporate business development strategies and leads the Vocera Experience Innovation Network, an international group focused on designing processes and technologies that disrupt the status quo in healthcare. Duffy serves on the advisory boards of Stanford MedicineX; Velano Vascular; Hygge Health; Maven Clinic; and the Institute for Healthcare Excellence.

Impact on HIT: As Vocera’s CMO, Duffy remains focused on improving the lives of patients and physicians by aiding in the design of next generation technologies that bridge communication gaps and improve care. Her end goal: returning physicians and nurses to the patient’s bedside, where she believes they are best able to improve clinical outcomes.

In 2014, Duffy was named among the “Top 50 in Digital Healthcare” by Rock Health, a full-service seed fund that supports startups building the next generation of technologies to transform healthcare. That same year she was recognized as “Health IT Change Agent” by Health IT Outcomes.

Duffy co-founded the Experience Innovation Network (EIN), made up primarily of other chief experience officers nationwide. The group wants to inspire healthcare leaders as they co-design new technology with patients, disrupt the status quo, and set the pace for the next standards in care delivery. EIN’s most recent research and event addressed physician/care team well-being, providing strategies to help hospitals and health systems combat burnout.

Bettina Experton, MD

Title: Founder, President and CEO

Organization: Humetrix

Years in HIT: 25

Previous Positions: Adjunct Associate Professor of Medicine, University of California at San Diego School of Medicine; Principal Investigator and Director, The San Diego Health Initiative (Outcome Research Study of the Frail Elderly funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation), Humetrix and Sharp HealthCare.

Significant Achievements: Experton is making ongoing contributions to government policies and standards development in consumer health IT. Her company is continuing the release of consumer-facing mobile platforms made possible by new open data and consumer engagement health IT policies in U.S. and Europe. It enables individuals to manage their own healthcare. Platforms enhance patient-physician communication; assist both patients and providers in better managing chronic conditions and reducing healthcare costs. Platforms leverage existing EHR standards and regulations for patient engagement and data sharing using both direct secure messaging transport protocol as well as APIs (including FHIR)

After winning HHS/ONC Industry Innovation competition in HIT three separate times, Humetrix became Blue Button health partner of the VA. It won National Health Service (NHS) 2016 Test Beds innovation competition. Two of its mobile health platforms (SOS QR for emergency care, TENSIO for hypertension management) selected for deployment in UK with goal of transforming delivery and efficiency of NHS services.

Impact on HIT: By making it easy for patients to assemble, aggregate, annotate and share their own health records, Experton demonstrates how mobile apps can help patients guard against medical errors and redundant testing. She believes that enabling Medicare patients to control when—and to whom—their health data is enabled through mobile apps. Medicare beneficiaries can better coordinate their care and enhance patient safety as they receive care from, on average, seven different providers in four different healthcare settings a year. (iBlueButton decodes and reformats Medicare claim data to create an actionable health record directly on the user’s mobile device.)

Judy Faulkner

Title: CEO and founder

Organization: Epic

Years in HIT: 40+

Previous Positions/Background: Software developer

Significant Achievements: Faulkner has expanded Epic without venture capital or going public. The company’s software was built in-house with no acquisitions. It is ranked by healthcare providers as the number one overall healthcare software suite. Use of the software has reduced hospital acquired infections and adverse drug events, helped patients prevent and manage chronic disease, and increased efficiency and cost savings. Epic was the first to develop an integrated system uniting acute and ambulatory, patient and payer on one database; the first self-service patient portal integrated with an EHR (MyChart); the first direct EHR-to-EHR interoperability network, now the largest in the U.S. (connected through Care Everywhere, Epic’s interoperability platform).

Impact on HIT: Faulkner founded Epic in 1979 as the original software developer, creating one of the first databases organized around a patient record and designed for clinical information. Epic has since grown from its modest beginnings as a clinical database company in an apartment basement to its current place as a leading provider of integrated healthcare software. The Epic community includes over 400 highly respected healthcare organizations that cover over 41,000 clinics, 1,900 hospitals, and more than 336,000 physicians. In the United States, the Epic community cares for over 58% of the total patient population. She currently serves on the University of Wisconsin Computer Science Board of Visitors and is a member of the National Academy of Medicine’s Leadership Roundtable.

Helen Figge

Title: Senior Vice President, Global Strategies and Development

Organization: LumiraDx USA, Waltham, Mass.

Years in HIT: 13 years exclusively in healthcare IT with extensive prior experiences in the healthcare field

Previous roles: Vice President, Global Clinical Integrations Accountable Care Solutions, Alere; Director, Clinical Integrations, Alere; Senior Director, Career Services, Professional Development, HIMSS; Director, Client Office (last held position), Allscripts; IT Consultant, HIXNY; Vice President, Strategic Solutions (last held position), AmerisourceBergen; Manager, Clinical Operations, St. Peter’s Health Partners.

Primary achievements: Figge helped to create unique patient engagement opportunities and healthcare best practices that support LumiraDx’s health IT solution sets, ultimately facilitating the empowerment and education of healthcare consumers both nationally and on an international level. She influences end users on critical healthcare issues by understanding, educating and authoring white papers, columns, blog pieces and social media content.

Figge works to accelerate the adoption of healthcare management solutions by serving on boards and committees for a number of influential organizations, including HIMSS, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives (CHIME), the State University of New York’s School of Public Health and Global Institute for Health and Human Rights, The Sullivan Institute and the Workgroup for Electronic Data Interchange (WEDI).

Impact on HIT: Figge strives to encourage critical thinking of current health IT industry trends. As a talented writer and pharmacist by trade, Figge authors, presents, mentors and voices her opinions on critical healthcare issues through various social media venues as well as extensive committee involvement, helping to shape the way healthcare is practiced nationally and internationally. She has helped educate thousands of healthcare executives, leaders and clinicians about the changes needed to improve the healthcare industry. As a volunteer board and committee member for HIMSS, CHIME and other organizations that serve national and international platforms, Figge actively works to improve healthcare IT standards and increase user adoption and awareness on how best to use healthcare technology solutions to improve health. Figge likewise mentors extensively in the healthcare industry teaching and coaching others how to create a career in the healthcare IT industry of tomorrow.

Figge seeks new opportunities to engage patients through healthcare management solutions. Toward this end, she helped create a nationally recognized program that supports clinical adoption of LumiraDx’s health IT solutions, while also targeting the educational needs of patient populations, such as those suffering from obesity, diabetes and cardiac conditions. These programs have been used by several national and international clients.

Jacquelyn Hunt

Title: Chief Population Health Officer

Organization: Enli Health Intelligence

Years in HIT: 20 years

Previous responsibilities: Consultant, Accountable Care Services, Providence Health & Services; CIO and Chief Quality Officer (last held position), Bellin Health System; Executive Director, Quality and Care Improvement (last held position), Providence Health & Services, Physician Division.

Significant achievements: Hunt co-invented Enli CareManager, which was named “Best in KLAS 2017” for population health management. She directed a health system EMR conversion across three hospitals and nearly 60 ambulatory locations, exceeding performance targets and budget. Hunt served as Chief Quality Officer for an institution recognized by Consumer Reports as “Safest Hospital in the Nation, 2013.”
She also has served as a Fellow for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement.

Impact on HIT: A pharmacist and advocate for evidence-based care, Hunt believes in the potential of HIT to achieve IHI’s Quadruple Aim of improved patient experience, lower total costs, enhanced population health and increased job satisfaction. This vision guided Hunt when co-inventing CareManager, which was originally developed at Providence Health & Services. Hunt also developed an HIT population health framework, which was the most downloaded Population Health Management paper in 2016.

Heidi Jannenga

Title: Co-Founder and President

Organization: WebPT

Years in HIT: 10

Previous responsibilities: Physical Therapist and Clinic Director, Physiotherapy Associates Tempe Sports Clinic; Physical Therapist and Center Manager, NovaCare; Physical Therapist, Trainer, and Rehabilitation Specialist, Various locations.

Significant Achievements: WebPT is garnering a third of the EMR market share in the rehabilitation therapy industry, and achieving a 99.9 percent customer retention rate for WebPT. Jannenga is steeringWebPT’s fast growth and being named one of the nation’s fastest-growing companies by Inc. four years in a row. She was named physical therapist of the year in 2015 by the Arizona Physical Therapy Association.

Impact on HIT: Jannenga saw the need for an outpatient rehab EMR while she was working as a sports physical therapist and clinic director. Market research showed that 80 percent of physical therapists were still using pen and paper for documentation. In 2008, she and co-founder Brad Jannenga launched WebPT, which is now the leading EMR solution for rehabilitation therapists.

In recent years, Jannenga recognized the industry’s shift to value-based payment and worked with her team to launch WebPT Outcomes, which allows rehabilitation therapists to track, analyze, and optimize patient outcomes and financial results. With this platform, therapists can hold themselves accountable for upholding high standards of care, negotiate insurance contracts, and collaborate with physicians and patients.

Jannenga’s passion for mentoring sparked the idea for PropelHer, a group she launched at WebPT to foster honest discussion about professional development, personal growth, and women’s empowerment.

Nora J. Lissy

Title: Healthcare Director/Subject Matter Expert

Organization: Dimensional Insight, Burlington, Mass.

Years in HIT: 11 years, and extensive experience in nursing.

Previous roles: Director, Clinical and Financial Decision Support, Baptist Health South Florida, Miami; Corporate Manager, Clinical Decision Support IT, Baptist Health South Florida, Miami; Corporate Director of Clinical Analysis, WakeMed Health & Hospitals, Raleigh, NC; Director, Decision Support, Endoscopy, Wound Care, Radiology Nursing and Outpatient Urology Services, Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, Florida; Director of Decision Support, Sarasota Memorial Health Care System, Florida.

Significant Achievements: As the subject matter expert for healthcare at Dimensional Insight, a developer of business intelligence software, Lissy, a registered nurse, is involved in every healthcare customer project from pre-sales to post-implementation. She works to bridge the gap between technical experts at Dimensional Insight and customers’ end users, such as clinicians and executives.

For example, Lissy played an active role in implementing Dimensional Insight’s solutions at Western Maryland Health System, a provider in Cumberland. Western Maryland used Dimensional Insight’s Diver software to measure, track and improve its performance on clinical quality measures used in the state of Maryland’s value-based reimbursement program. Because of its efforts, Western Maryland moved from last place among 46 hospitals in the state to first place in terms of performance on quality measures, such as readmission and mortality rates.

Lissy also was instrumental in helping Gwinnett Medical Center use Dimensional Insight’s product suite to create metrics to track the performance of a program to staff the ICU with hospitalists. Gwinnett operates hospitals in Lawrenceville and Duluth, Ga.

In addition to her work with customers, Lissy also is involved in the development of business intelligence products at Dimensional Insight, such as the Measure Factory, software that allows health systems to define and track performance measures over time. Lissy views her role on Dimensional Insight’s Clinical Advisory Committee as the “voice” of the end users at health systems, medical practices and other client organizations.

Impact on HIT: Lissy has worked at both health systems and a technology vendor to promote the role of BI software in providing information to end users involved in managing patient-care processes and outcomes.

Mandy Long

Title: Vice President, Product Management

Organization: Modernizing Medicine

Years in HIT: 9

Previous responsibilities: Vice President, Product Management and HIS Strategy, Experian Health; Install Process Owner and Senior Project Manager, Epic.

Significant Achievements: Long led a team that launched four products in a single year related to telemedicine, pathology, analytics, and practice management. She was instrumental in Modernizing Medicine winning #1 Black Book-rated EHR system in four specialties in 2016. Long serves as Chair of the Clinician Experience Workgroup for the HIMSS Electronic Health Records Association.

Impact on HIT: In addition to developing and launching software solutions, Long is a champion of HIT usability. She believes that user participation in product development is key to delivering solutions to solve the right problems in the right way at the right time. She led Modernizing Medicine’s first hack-a-thon, during which company staff worked side-by-side with clients, including physicians and practice executives, to design and prototype new product features. As EHRA workgroup chair, Long is engaging the physician community more deeply through usability summits and education.

Long is passionate about mentoring women, particularly working moms and moms-to-be, interested in balancing a successful HIT career and home life. She is a founding member of Modernizing Medicine’s Women in Innovation and Technology (MMwit) community, which helps develop and support women employees. Long also helped launch the Modernizing Parenthood initiative, which gives working parents helpful tips and a support structure for parenting and career success.

Sarah Muckler

Title: Global Director of Business Development, Health Partners

Organization: Microsoft

Years in HIT: 18

Previous roles: Worldwide Director of Marketing for Health Industry, Microsoft; Senior Marketing Manager, Global Healthcare Solutions, Symantec; U.S. Senior Marketing Manager and consultant for radiology information systems, acute care, Agfa HealthCare; Southeast Regional Sales Manager, Merge Healthcare.

Significant Achievements: Since being promoted to her current position in 2016, Muckler has been involved in two large projects. First, she manages a co-selling program to help Microsoft’s healthcare technology partners sell their products and services to prospective customers, such as health systems. Through this program, Microsoft provides help in a variety of ways, including sending its personnel out on sales calls with its partners to describe the technical details of Microsoft’s products, such as how it secures confidential health information on its cloud platform. During the current fiscal year, which ends June 30, Muckler has grown the number of formal co-selling arrangements with technology partners from 40 to 168.

She also leads the management of a two-day training session about Microsoft’s products. The training session was created for developers who work at Microsoft’s healthcare technology partners. So far, Microsoft’s trainers have held sessions at 45 different locations in 30 countries for 1,000 developers.

In Muckler’s previous role as worldwide marketing director for health at Microsoft, she created an integrated approach to marketing Microsoft’s products and technologies across its healthcare-related websites and social channels. Using this approach, Microsoft can reach up to 10 million professionals in the healthcare industry per month.

Impact on HIT: Throughout her career, Muckler has worked to drive sales and adoption of health information technology, including radiology information systems, billing and scheduling software and patient kiosks.

Lauren O'Donnell

Title: Global Vice President

Organization: IBM Watson Health Life Sciences Industry

Years in HIT: 35+

Previous Positions: Global General Manager of Life Sciences Industry, IBM; Vice President Healthcare and Life Sciences, handling major accounts in 21 western states; Vice President and Managing Director for Amgen’s account; Managing Partner in Global Business Services for the Distribution Industry.

Recent Achievements: Last December, IBM announced a collaboration with Pfizer to deploy the newly launched Watson for Drug Discovery to help accelerate Pfizer’s research in immuno-oncology, an approach to cancer treatment that uses the body’s immune system to help fight cancer. Pfizer was the first Watson Health client to customize the cloud-based cognitive platform—tapping in to Watson’s machine learning, natural language processing, and other cognitive reasoning technologies. The goal: to support the identification of new drug targets, combination therapies for study, and patient selection strategies in immuno-oncology.

Additionally, O'Donnell is leading the transformation of patient safety by forging a collaboration with Celgene. The companies want to evolve patient safety from a reactive manual process into a proactive source of safety insight -- one that allows biopharmaceutical companies to act earlier and with greater confidence to protect patient well-being. The two-and-a-half-year collaboration with Celgene is an endeavor to rethink the methods and processes supporting pharmaco-vigilance through cognitive computing, big data and a purpose- built cloud. The project will reinvent the intake, evaluation and reporting of adverse events, as well as enhance signal detection with real world data and novel analytical methods. O'Donnell embarked on this effort because she sees it as a critical strategic pillar in Watson Health’s mission to transform approaches to care and patient safety.

Impact on HIT: In today’s information-overloaded environment, where data is only as powerful as the insights generated from it, O'Donnell believes the key actually lies in the application of the cognitive as well. Specifically, cognitive allows life science organizations to systematically analyze knowledge sources—such as clinical study reports, licensed publications and patents—because it has been trained in the scientific domain and can understand the language of researchers.

From helping a leading neurological institute develop novel ALS treatments to predicting optimal target therapies for cardiovascular disease and to transforming how researchers discover new drugs and determine which drugs could potentially be repurposed in the fight against Parkinson’s disease: Those are examples of how O'Donnell and her team are helping Life Sciences executives see the impact IBM’s offerings can have for both researchers and patient populations depending on them.

Helen Waters

Title: Executive Vice President

Organization: MEDITECH

Years in HIT: 26

Previous positions: Various positions with MEDITECH--Vice President of Client Services, Sales Director, Sales Manager, Sales Representative and Marketing Support; Competitive Intelligence Manager, Dun & Bradstreet.

Significant Achievements: As executive vice president of sales and marketing, Waters is leveraging her deep understanding of customers’ needs and concerns, and has combined the company’s marketing and selling functions to educate existing customers on products, capabilities, pathways, and other corporate initiatives. She is also taking on an increasing role as a spokesperson and industry voice to help organizations understand how to leverage technology-driven information solutions to support their organizational goals.

Impact on HIT: In addition, along with her executive vice president peers and the CEO, Waters is helping to make strategic decisions that impact MEDITECH’s future, leveraging her experience and insights into both MEDITECH and the healthcare industry.