The Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT for 2018—Thought leaders

2018's Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT—Thought leaders

For the third year, Health Data Management is recognizing 50 of the Most Powerful Women in Healthcare IT. The awards are broken into three categories—CIOs/HIT executives at provider organizations, thought leaders and HIT vendor executives. The following is the list of thought leaders.ds

Yesterday, HDM published its list of the 25 CIOs and HIT executives who are the most powerful at provider organizations. That list can be found here.

Laura Adams

Title: President/CEO

Organization: Rhode Island Quality Institute

Years in HIT: 29

Previous Positions: Founder, President and CEO of Decision Support Systems; faculty member for the Institute for Healthcare Improvement, Boston.

Significant Achievements: At RIQI, Adams leads her teams’ information technology innovation projects to transform care delivery in the state. The organization has launched designee alerts of loved ones’ conditions, and it’s revamped the statewide provider directory to aggregate and normalize provider data from multiple sources.

Impact on HIT: In 2006, she led development of Rhode Island’s Statewide Health Information Exchange.

Dana Alexander

Title: Executive Director

Organization: EY

Years in HIT: 15+

Previous Positions: Vice President, Clinical Advisory Services, Divurgent; Vice President, Integrated Care Delivery and Chief Nursing Officer, Caradigm; Vice President and Chief Nursing Officer, GE Healthcare; Senior Consulting Executive, Cerner.

Significant Achievements: Alexander is working to advance the nursing profession, serving as the voice of nursing at the board level. She also influences public policy through advocacy.

Impact on HIT: Alexander continually builds bridges and leverages professional connections to impact policy and improve quality outcomes and patient safety. She consistently pushes for patients and consumers.

Kelly Barnes

Title: Leader of the U.S. Health Industries Practice

Organization: PricewaterhouseCoopers

Years in HIT: 11

Previous Positions: Barnes has spent her entire career at PricewaterhouseCoopers.

Significant Achievements: Under Barnes’ leadership, PwC announced the launch of DoubleJump Health, an accelerator for consumer healthcare applications.

Impact on HIT: Barnes’ leadership of the PwC healthcare practice began during the lead-up to the passage of the Affordable Care Act, allowing her to set forth a new strategy based on the changing dynamics of the industry. “The money was going to be moving differently, and every time that happens, the game changes,” she says.

Helen Figge

Title: Senior Advisor

Organization: National Health IT (NHIT) Collaborative for the Underserved; various roles in other organizations

Years in HIT: 14

Previous Positions: Vice President, Global Clinical Integrations Accountable Care Solutions, Alere; Director, Clinical Integrations, Alere; Senior Director, Career Services, Professional Development, HIMSS.

Significant 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.

Impact on HIT: Figge strives to encourage critical thinking of current health IT industry trends. 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.

Halee S. Fischer-Wright, MD

Title: President and CEO

Organization: Medical Group Management Association

Years in HIT: NA

Previous Positions: Chief Medical Officer, St. Anthony North Health Campus, Centura Health, Westminster, Colo.; President, Rose Medical Group, Denver; Consultant, CultureSync, Los Angeles.

Significant Achievements: Fischer-Wright has positioned MGMA to become a marquee tenant at the Catalyst Health-Tech Innovation Center, slated to open this year. The association’s new space is being created as part of a strategy to make MGMA a leading voice in shaping the future of digital health and HIT.

Impact on HIT: Through speeches, panel discussions and collaboration with other organizations, Fischer-Wright has worked to raise MGMA’s profile and voice in discussions about the role of IT in delivering safe and effective patient care.

Rachel Hall

Title: Executive Director, U.S. Health Advisory-Performance Improvement

Organization: EY

Years in HIT: 24

Previous Positions: Vice President of Product Management, Global Healthcare Exchange; Senior Associate of Healthcare Point B, Consulting; Associate-Healthcare, Booz Allen Hamilton.

Significant Achievements: Hall has brought EY solutions for IT to market and trained 150 individuals on their use through methodology training and hands-on experience, and by providing leadership in digital health, health supply chain and population health management.

Impact on HIT: Hall is frequently expected to solve what others can’t, and is often called upon to resolve clients’ challenges that require original and inventive solutions.

Wylecia Wiggs Harris

Title: CEO

Organization: American Health Information Management Association

Years in HIT: 1

Previous Positions: CEO, League of Women Voters of the United States; COO and Chief of Staff, American Nurses Association; Executive Director, Center for American Nurses; Executive Director, Sister to Sister Foundation; Senior Vice President and Executive Director, American Heart Association.

Significant Achievements: Harris raised the presence of the LWV and plans to similarly strengthen AHIMA’s membership and foster internal and external partnerships.

Impact on HIT: Harris is known for her ability to bring organizational change. She maintains an increased focus on continuing education and exploration of new roles in health IM.

Sita Kapoor

Title: Co-founder and CIO

Organization: HealthEC

Years in HIT: 25+

Previous Positions: Co-founder and CIO of IGI Health, a provider of IT solutions and BPO services, where she built the Med-Link clearinghouse; various consulting roles.

Significant Achievements: Kapoor directs HealthEC’s research and development team, which applies mathematical and computational models to develop large-scale data integration and analytics solutions to help providers identify risky patients who require close medical attention. She played a key role in developing its analytics engine.

Impact on HIT: While at HealthEC, Kapoor built a data warehouse that enabled DC Medicaid to benefit from population health management.

Margaret E. O’Kane

Title: President

Organization: National Committee for Quality Assurance

Years in HIT: 27

Previous Positions: Respiratory therapist.

Significant Achievements: O’Kane has served as president of the National Committee for Quality Assurance since 1990. She was named Health Person of the Year in 1996 by the Journal of Medicine and Health. She received a 1997 Founder’s Award from The American College of Medical Quality, recognizing NCQA’s efforts to improve managed care quality.

Impact on HIT: Under O’Kane’s leadership, NCQA developed HEDIS to measure quality. HEDIS is widely used to shape health IT incentives, including meaningful use and measures under the Merit-Based Incentive Payment System.

Robecca Quammen

Title: CEO-Founder

Organization: MyConsultQ, Quammen Health Care Consultants

Years in HIT: 30+

Previous Positions: National executive role, HBOC, now McKesson; Dorenfest & Associates; Adventist Health System.

Significant Achievements: Quammen has worked with many of the leading academic, for-profit and community hospitals in America, providing expert IS professional, technical and outsourcing services, allowing them to successfully deploy information systems for clinical and business operations.

Impact on HIT: Quammen has helped countless physicians, clinicians and care delivery systems deploy technology, infrastructure and electronic health systems. At HBOC, she pioneered a repeatable implementation methodology that was new to the healthcare industry.

Sue Schade

Title: Principal

Organization: StarBridge Advisors

Years in HIT: 35

Previous Positions: Interim CIO, University Hospitals in Cleveland; CIO, University of Michigan Hospitals and Health Centers; CIO, Brigham and Women’s/Faulkner Hospital; Senior Manager, Healthcare IT Practice, Ernst & Young.

Significant Achievements: Schade has leveraged new technology in healthcare with lean principles to improve care delivery and efficiency. She also advanced the use of electronic health records in her roles as CIO of various organizations.

Impact on HIT: Schade is an active member of both CHIME and HIMSS. She writes a weekly blog and is a frequent speaker committed to developing the next generation of HIT leaders.

Carla Smith

Title: Executive Vice President, North America

Organization: Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society

Years in HIT: 26

Previous Positions: CEO of the Center for Healthcare Information Management; Director of the Michigan Modernization Service.

Significant Achievements: Smith helped to make HIMSS a major voice in healthcare. She is an influencer of health laws, including the meaningful use EHR adoption incentive rules, Affordable Care Act, Medicare Access and CHIP Reauthorization Act of 2015 and cybersecurity provisions in 2016 legislation.

Impact on HIT: Smith serves as a health sector thought leader on the best use of IT as a tool to improve health.

Sheri Stoltenberg

Title: CEO

Organization: Stoltenberg Consulting

Years in HIT: 30+

Previous Positions: Director, Ancillary Systems, Shadyside Hospital; Advisory Installation Director, Shared Medical Systems.

Significant Achievements: In 1995, Stoltenberg founded Stoltenberg Consulting, a healthcare IT consulting firm that employs more than 180 professionals.

Impact on HIT: Stoltenberg is committed to innovation, supporting women in leadership and fostering the knowledge of HIT workers to eliminate healthcare system inefficiencies through reinvented HIT support. She was the first to establish a CHIME education foundation scholarship for CIO career development, to which she pledged $50,000.

Seema Verma

Title: Administrator

Organization: Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services

Years in HIT: NA

Previous Positions: Founder, SVC. a consulting organization serving state Medicaid programs.

Significant Achievements: Through her health policy consulting company, Verma established her reputation for her work on Indiana’s redesigned Medicaid program. She also worked with Ohio and Kentucky to change those states’ programs.

Impact on HIT: Verma is now affecting HIT policy, and healthcare policy more broadly, through changes being implemented through CMS. The agency recently issued proposed regulations that would ease the burden on providers to report on efforts to implement EHR systems.

Mariann Yeager

Title: CEO

Organization: The Sequoia Project

Years in HIT: 26

Previous Positions: Nationwide Health Information Network Initiatives, Office of the National Coordinator for Health IT; Certification Program Director, CCHIT; Vice President, Healthcare Practice, TruArx.

Significant Achievements: Yeager leads The Sequoia Project, the nonprofit home of one of the nation’s largest health data sharing networks, the eHealth Exchange, and the leading, national-level interoperability framework for trusted exchange between and among networks, Carequality.

Impact on HIT: Yeager has been a leading figure in expanding both health IT interoperability capabilities and connectivity capacity nationwide.