170 women in health IT to know | 2026

The future of health IT is being shaped by women who are completing the essential work of making healthcare smarter, faster and more effective.

They are untangling administrative complexity, eliminating inefficiencies, standardizing workflows and implementing innovative measures that impact entire organizations.

Meet 170 women in health IT who are driving transformative change.

Note: This list was compiled using nominations and editorial research. This list is not exhaustive, nor is it an endorsement of included leaders or associated healthcare providers. Leaders cannot pay for inclusion on this list. Leaders are presented in alphabetical order.

Contact Anna Falvey at afalvey@beckershealthcare.com with questions or comments.

Hospitals and Health Systems

Deb Anderson. CIO of Endeavor Health (Evanston, Ill.). Ms. Anderson brings a mission-driven, human-centered approach to digital innovation at Endeavor Health, guided by personal experiences and a collaborative leadership style. She has helped launch groundbreaking technologies, including one of the world’s first virtual care platforms, years before telehealth became a norm. At Endeavor Health, she drives agile platform strategies and oversees Epic integrations that enhance patient-centered care across multiple hospitals. With a background spanning IBM, Abbott and Silicon Valley innovation labs, Ms. Anderson seamlessly blends corporate agility with healthcare transformation, reshaping care delivery while promoting workforce wellness and transparency.

Pam Austin. Former Senior Vice President and CIO at Ballad Health (Nashville, Tenn.). Ms. Austin oversaw Ballad Health’s IT team and operations with responsibility for governance, strategy, architecture, analytics, security and the optimization of technology platforms, having been named senior vice president and CIO in 2020 after serving as senior vice president and interim CIO since April 2019. Ms. Austin played an essential role in preparing Ballad Health for one of its most significant initiatives, which was a systemwide launch of Epic that standardizes medical records across the health system and makes them accessible to other healthcare providers, resulting in improved patient care. She also led the IT team in achieving a key milestone in the Epic conversion that enabled Ballad Health to transition to a new domain with a common email system and unified EHR. Ms. Austin began her career as a senior system analyst and progressed through roles of increasing responsibility. Throughout her leadership roles, she has provided oversight for IT strategy, product development, technology assessment and the implementation of critical enterprise system changes.

Kristen Bates. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Operations at University Hospitals (Cleveland). Ms. Bates is responsible for strategic direction and executive leadership within the revenue cycle team at University Hospitals. She oversees and provides a best-practice vision for mid-cycle and backend RCM functions, including health information services and coding and billing. She also provides leadership and guidance for members of the revenue management team. She collaborates with internal and external customers to facilitate meetings and financial targets. She has been with UH for nearly 30 years and has been a senior revenue cycle leader for a decade. She has also helped the system organize and execute opportunities to leverage robotics, systems and other solutions that have resulted in efficiency and performance improvement. 

Ashley Beecy, MD. Chief AI Officer at Sutter Health (Sacramento, Calif.). Dr. Beecy leads enterprise AI strategy, governance and implementation across Sutter Health, one of the nation’s largest nonprofit healthcare systems, overseeing systemwide deployment of AI embedded directly into clinical and operational workflows. She has advanced an enterprise AI operating model that supports more than 2.5 million patient encounters each month with zero reported adverse events, and has helped AI investments deliver measurable value, with automation and workflow improvements saving Sutter teams more than 1.6 million hours in 2025, returning time to patient care. Dr. Beecy pairs scaled deployment with strong governance and physician oversight to support safe, effective use. Before joining Sutter, she served as medical director of AI operations at New York City-based NewYork-Presbyterian, overseeing AI operations and systemwide AI initiatives across an 11-hospital system. A board-certified cardiologist and clinical informaticist, she has authored peer-reviewed research in clinical informatics, cardiovascular medicine and applied AI.

Kathy Bereston. Vice President of Revenue Cycle Performance Improvement and Employed Clinical Network at Ascension (St. Louis). Ms. Bereston has overseen and strategically led Ascension’s employed clinical network revenue cycle activities and resources across the organization since July 2024, providing strategic input on revenue cycle optimization across functions. Ms. Bereston is a transformational leader with more than 20 years of healthcare management experience, recognized for identifying opportunities to improve operational excellence, redesigning processes and infrastructure and mobilizing people to execute and sustain change. She holds a Lean Six Sigma Black Belt and brings significant expertise across strategic planning, productivity and performance management, budgeting and cost reduction, patient-centric design and software implementation. Her career is marked by measurable results in standardizing operations processes, improving patient satisfaction scores and building cultures of trust, continuous improvement and commitment to problem-solving. Ms. Bereston also brings deep knowledge of regulation and compliance spanning human resources, revenue cycle and IT.

Edwina Bhaskaran, MSN, RN. Chief Clinical Systems and Informatics Leader at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.). Ms. Bhaskaran oversees more than 1,000 team members across clinical systems and informatics at Mayo Clinic, helping build flexible governance models that allow the organization to innovate quickly with AI while keeping responsible use and culture front of mind. Ms. Bhaskaran has led the deployment of generative AI supporting decisions for more than 3 million patients, ensuring AI-generated suggestions carry clear labels and are traceable back to source data. Her governance approach is grounded in a human-in-the-loop design that keeps clinicians as the ultimate decision-makers, with deployments conducted in controlled environments before scaling and continuous performance monitoring for accuracy. As Mayo Clinic deploys AI at scale across the enterprise, Ms. Bhaskaran plays a central role in translating the organization’s commitment to responsible AI into practical, operational frameworks that balance innovation velocity with clinical safety.

Nikki Blaze. Assistant Vice President of Information Systems Clinical Applications at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center. Ms. Blaze leads clinical applications at Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, harnessing AI and cutting-edge technology to enhance clinical workflows, reduce documentation burdens and drive transformative change across the organization. Ms. Blaze has more than 20 years of health IT experience, including leading large-scale EHR implementations and educating clinical and operational staff on health IT adoption. She has worked with multiple EHR systems, including performing testing and certification for EHRs. She is an active member of American Health Information Management Association, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and American Medical Informatics Association. Ms. Blaze has held her current role since January 2024 and is known for building high-performing teams through strategic management. 

Kerry Bommarito, PhD. Vice President of Enterprise AI and Decision Intelligence at Mercy (Chesterfield, Mo.). Dr. Bommarito leads the development and architecture management for AI and decision intelligence at Mercy, overseeing AI solution development, advanced analytics and the enablement of scalable AI capabilities across the enterprise. She also works closely with Mercy’s leadership to match AI initiatives with enterprise priorities. Over the past year, she has been central to shifting Mercy’s approach from building individual AI tools to creating a system that supports AI at scale, including the development and scale of Mercy’s first enterprise generative AI solution platform for clinical workflows, which has generated more than 300,000 patient transition summaries to date. She has also advanced agent-based AI solutions in revenue cycle, reducing manual task time from nearly an hour to just minutes with millions in cost savings and recovered payments. Dr. Bommarito chairs Mercy’s clinically integrated network data and IT committee, serves as Mercy’s representative to the Coalition for Health AI, and chaired the St. Louis Area Covid analytics workgroup during the pandemic. Mercy has earned level 9 College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Digital Health Most Wired” honors for 22 consecutive years.

Emily Borlas. Assistant Vice President of Enterprise IT Applications at HonorHealth (Scottsdale, Ariz.). Ms. Borlas leads a 180-person team managing more than 400 software applications across HonorHealth, co-leading what has been described as the “fastest Epic implementation in the West.” This entails deploying Epic across multiple specialty clinics and inpatient facilities in an accelerated timeline using only internal resources, a project that has earned national recognition. Ms. Borlas also developed an application rationalization program that streamlined HonorHealth’s software portfolio, reducing redundancies, improving user experience and generating significant cost savings. She is driving HonorHealth’s adoption of emerging technologies including AI, helping position the organization as an early adopter while ensuring solutions deliver measurable results in clinical workflows and patient care. Through partnerships across human resources, finance and supply chain, she has helped drive enterprisewide transformation including implementation of a shared enterprise resource planning platform. HonorHealth was named to Forbes‘ “America’s Best Employers by State” list in 2023, 2024 and 2025 and has earned Healthgrades “Patient Safety Excellence Awards” across those years.

Crystal Broj. Chief Digital Transformation Officer at Medical University of South Carolina (Charleston, S.C.). Ms. Broj leads systemwide transformation at MUSC at the intersection of technology, operations and patient experience, overseeing cross-functional teams that bring together IT, clinical leaders, operations, finance and analytics to co-design and implement change. To do so, the team establishes clear key performance indicators and uses data-driven storytelling to demonstrate value from improved access and patient satisfaction to operational efficiency and financial impact. Ms. Broj has been recognized with a gold “Stevie Award” as “Female Executive of the Year” in 2025, a HotTopics “Global Chief Digital Officer 100 Award” in both 2024 and 2025, and as a 2026 Business Transformation World Summit winner for “Best Transformation Delivering Customer Excellence,” and was named a 2026 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Changemaker of the Year” finalist. She serves on advisory boards for the Avia innovation summit, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives fall summit, CX Exchange East and OPEX, as well as on the South Carolina Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society board. She’s also secretary of Bluebird Leaders’ board in 2026. 

Joy Brown. Senior Vice President and CDIO at Boston Medical Center Health System. Ms. Brown leads Boston Medical Center Health System’s technology organization, overseeing digital transformation, technology strategy, cybersecurity and data innovation with a steadfast commitment to improving healthcare access, efficiency and outcomes for patients and communities. Among her most significant accomplishments, she spearheaded the seamless integration of two system locations into a unified Epic platform, establishing a “one patient, one record” foundation that replaced fragmented data silos with a secure, interoperable infrastructure and improved patient outcomes across the entire network. Ms. Brown and her team have also led the health system’s data and AI strategy, with particular focus on deploying ambient AI technology to reduce clinical burnout. She has been instrumental in designing the system’s digital front door to manage every touchpoint of the patient journey, ranging from scheduling through follow-up. Thanks in large part to her work, Boston Medical Center Health System has been recognized as one of the “World’s Best Smart Hospitals” by Newsweek in both 2024 and 2025. Prior to joining the system, Ms. Brown brought deep cross-industry expertise as chief data officer at Verizon Media and as a leader of the global data, analytics and machine learning function at Capital One. She currently serves on the boards of Huron Consulting, ESO and ValidiFi.

Christine Brutschea. Vice President of IT at St. Luke’s University Health Network (Bethlehem, Pa.). Ms. Brutschea brings more than 36 years of progressive leadership experience in healthcare information systems to St. Luke’s University Health Network, overseeing a broad application portfolio and multimillion-dollar budgets across both for-profit and nonprofit environments. Ms. Brutschea led the health system’s successful transition of hospital and ambulatory sites to a new EHR system and subsequently pioneered one of the first cloud migrations for EHR, which now supports more than 80 cloud-based applications. She also spearheaded the deployment of Teams telephony with a bring-your-own-device strategy, and launched a digital front door that centralizes patient access for scheduling, medical triage and medication refills. St. Luke’s was recognized in 2025 by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services as one of the nation’s three highest-performing health systems for quality, safety and patient experience, and is the only Lehigh Valley, Pa.-based system to earn Medicare’s 5-star ratings for quality, efficiency and patient satisfaction. The network has earned straight A’s from Leapfrog across all of its acute care hospitals and has received “100 Top Hospital” designations from Premier for 11 consecutive years. Beyond the health system, Ms. Brutschea has served as president of the Delaware Valley Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society chapter and co-chaired a “Girls in STEM” program connecting local high school students to careers in healthcare IT.

Bobbie Byrne, MD. Senior Executive Vice President and CIO at Advocate Health (Charlotte, N.C.). Dr. Byrne leads enterprise IT and digital strategy for the nation’s third-largest integrated nonprofit health system, encompassing 69 hospitals and more than 1,100 care sites across multiple states. As the CIO during the strategic system combination that created Advocate Health, she guided IT through a period of extraordinary complexity by unifying complex clinical, administrative and infrastructure environments while maintaining uninterrupted patient care and advancing digital and AI-enabled capabilities simultaneously. A signature accomplishment of her tenure is ensuring the stability and security of the technology environment while advancing frameworks such as FAIR-AI, the “Framework for Appropriate Implementation and Review of AI,” which governs how Advocate Health evaluates AI solutions for equity, reliability, transparency and impact before and during deployment. A board-certified physician with experience in clinical practice and health system leadership, Dr. Byrne brings a clinician’s perspective to enterprise IT decision-making. She also serves as a board member of Truveta and Spok.

Beth Carlson. Chief Revenue Officer at Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center (Columbus). Ms. Carlson joined Ohio State University Wexner Medical Center as chief revenue officer, bringing a track record of progressive revenue cycle leadership across major academic and health system environments. Ms. Carlson most recently served as chief revenue officer at WVU Medicine in Morgantown, W.Va., a role she held beginning in March 2025 after joining the organization in 2020 as senior enterprise director of revenue cycle integration. Prior, she was named vice president of revenue in May 2024. Before WVU Medicine, she served as a senior revenue management consultant for Guidehouse and as a performance assurance manager for Highmark Health in Pittsburgh.

Carmella Cassetta. Vice President and CIO at Hoag Health System (Newport Beach, Calif.). Ms. Cassetta leads strategy, performance and continuous evolution of the technology environment at Hoag Health System, overseeing the EHR, clinical and business applications, infrastructure, network engineering, cloud platforms and enterprise architecture across the organization, and is leading technology strategy and execution for Hoag’s $1 billion expansion of the Sun Family Campus, set to open September 2026. Her team is responsible for ensuring that new facilities, including a dedicated women’s hospital, dedicated cancer and digestive health hospital, outpatient pavilions and a surgical pavilion, are fully integrated into the health system’s digital ecosystem at opening, supporting real-time data access and care coordination from day one. Ms. Cassetta brings prior leadership experience at Ingram Micro and Barnes & Noble, applying customer-centric platform principles to healthcare delivery. She was named the 2024 Southern California ORBIE “Healthcare CIO of the Year” and is actively engaged with the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and the Advancing Women in Technology advisory board. Hoag has been the highest-ranked hospital in Orange County, Calif. by U.S. News & World Report for nine consecutive years.

Sandhya Chandrasekhar. Associate Vice President, Enterprise Analytics and Data Engineering at Memorial Hermann Health System (Houston). Ms. Chandrasekhar recently led and completed “Nucleus,” a historic cloud-powered transformation of Memorial Hermann’s enterprise data foundation that now enables AI, advanced analytics and next-generation enterprise intelligence at scale, supporting clinical, operational and executive leaders in faster decision-making. Ms. Chandrasekhar also guided analytics for the $700 million Memorial Hermann Epic migration and led analytics for the launch of a new hospital for a large pediatric health system in the Northeast, a $259 million initiative. She has also supported enterprise analytics strategy through complex health system mergers. Under her leadership, the Memorial Hermann enterprise analytics team was recognized as a “Top 50 Data & Analytics Team in the Nation” by OnConferences. A national presenter and respected voice in health IT, she is known for building high-performing teams and delivering complex transformations.

Jessica Collins, DNP, RN. CNIO at UK HealthCare (Lexington, Ky.). Dr. Collins has served as CNIO at UK HealthCare since 2023, acting as the IT advisor to the chief nurse executive while overseeing the clinical informatics and IT education departments. Dr. Collins leads the continued evaluation of existing and emerging technology against proven standards in functionality, design, continuity of care and workflow efficiency, and plans, develops and implements strategies to enhance service delivery while assuring efficiency and safety across nursing practice and operations at UK HealthCare and its affiliates. She brings a distinctive clinical foundation to her informatics leadership. Before becoming CNIO, she spent 12 years as a pediatric critical care nurse in the pediatric ICU, then served as inpatient nursing workflow lead for an Epic implementation and as a nursing informaticist in IT for four years. Her trajectory from bedside to workflow lead to enterprise informatics leadership gave Dr. Collins a firsthand understanding of how technology decisions translate to real-world clinical impact. 

Myra Davis. Executive Vice President and Chief Information and Innovation Officer at Texas Children’s Hospital (Houston). Ms. Davis leads enterprise technology, AI-driven innovation and cybersecurity strategy for the largest children’s hospital in the U.S., overseeing a 600-person IT organization supporting more than 140 sites and 5 million patient encounters annually. Under Ms. Davis’s direction, Texas Children’s has expanded ambient documentation, virtual care, remote patient monitoring and data governance capabilities. Her leadership has also helped operationalize AI, including a proprietary model that automates bone age assessment and reduces radiologists’ interpretation time. Together, these initiatives have delivered nearly $90 million in additional net revenue through clinical documentation integrity while reducing clinical workload and turnaround times. She also modernized the organization’s cybersecurity program, earning a No. 1 national healthcare cybersecurity ranking while maintaining Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society stage 7 designations and Magnet status. Ms. Davis is a multiple-time ORBIE “CIO of the Year” honoree and a College of Healthcare Information Management Executives faculty member.

Kayce Degenhardt. Vice President of IT Clinical Applications at Inova Health System (Fairfax, Va.). Ms. Degenhardt has delivered systemwide impact at Inova since stepping into her role, beginning with a comprehensive reset of IT Clinical Applications operations that produced an 87% reduction in application backlog within just six weeks, thus reenergizing staff and rebuilding organizational confidence in IT’s ability to deliver reliably. She then launched “The Reset,” one of Inova’s most ambitious enterprisewide technology initiatives, focused on strengthening core Epic components that shape frontline clinical workflows and resulting in a 35% decrease in provider documentation time across many specialties and saving more than 900 clinician hours each month. In radiology, a new Epic functionality reduced advanced imaging appointment wait times by six full days. Under Ms. Degenhardt’s leadership, Inova attained Epic configuration level 10 and utilization level 8, along with Epic “Honor Roll Summa Cum Laude” status, with Epic corporate leadership noting that her team was completing in six months a journey that often takes top-performing organizations more than a year. Inova is also the first health system to attain the Joint Commission’s “Responsible Use of Health Data” certification.

Julie Demaree. Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at St. Mary’s Healthcare (Amsterdam, N.Y.). Ms. Demaree drives digital strategy at St. Mary’s Healthcare, advancing electronic order management, centralizing medical records, strengthening interoperability, introducing AI and building a robust data governance framework. She joined the organization in July 2023. Ms. Demaree established and continues to evolve St. Mary’s IT governance committee, which meets weekly to optimize the EHR through a broad stakeholder lens that prevents negative downstream effects. Prior, during her tenure at Saratoga Hospital in Saratoga Springs, N.Y., she led telehealth implementation, electronic self-registration, and centralized patient navigation. A physician assistant with more than 25 years of experience in clinical informatics, data integrity and workflow improvement, she is a fellow of the American Academy of Physician Associates and holds board certification from the National Commission on Certification of Physician Assistants, as well as a fellowship in the American College of Health Data Management. St. Mary’s was named to Forbes “Top Hospitals” for 2026 and was recognized as a 2025 “Top Workplace” by the Times Union, the first acute-care hospital in its region to receive that honor.

Monique Díaz, MD. Vice President and Regional CMIO at CommonSpirit Health’s California Region. Dr. Díaz leads a team dedicated to implementing and optimizing clinically facing health information technologies across CommonSpirit Health’s California region, a large and diverse population served by one of the nation’s largest nonprofit health systems. She assumed the vice president and regional CMIO role in 2024, having previously served as CMIO for physician enterprise west at CommonSpirit. Dr. Díaz is a recognized expert in clinical informatics with extensive experience in value-based care, population health management and closing care gaps, and is a strong advocate for data-driven quality improvement initiatives. She is also deeply committed to addressing healthcare disparities and advocating for vulnerable populations. Prior to CommonSpirit, she served as CMIO at a nonprofit community clinic organization, where she successfully navigated the clinical and operational challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic while simultaneously leading a transformative shift toward value-based care. Throughout her career, Dr. Díaz has demonstrated a proven track record of driving innovation and improving patient care through the strategic use of health IT. 

Tracy Donegan. Chief Information and Innovation Officer at MLK Community Healthcare (Los Angeles). Ms. Donegan brings more than 20 years of healthcare industry experience to her role as chief information and innovation officer at MLK Community Healthcare, with expertise spanning strategy, business process transformation, consolidations, outsourcing and large-scale system implementations across freestanding hospitals, health systems, durable medical equipment and homecare providers. Ms. Donegan’s vision in her role is to support hospital leaders in achieving their objectives through technology solutions that enable growth and innovation in population health, unique healthcare delivery models, value-based reimbursement and consumer engagement. This approach is shaped by her consulting background and grounded in collaborative, multidisciplinary problem-solving. Before joining the system, she served as assistant vice president of the Cognizant Healthcare Provider Consulting Practice and as vice president of strategy management and alignment at Apria Healthcare. Earlier in her career, she spent several years as a manager at BearingPoint, one of the “big four” global consulting firms.

Charity Dorazio. CIO at Adventist HealthCare (Gaithersburg, Md.). Ms. Dorazio is a proven executive leader in health IT with more than 25 years of progressive experience across two continents, currently overseeing IT infrastructure, operations and data security at Adventist HealthCare in support of patient care delivery. Ms. Dorazio joined Adventist HealthCare in 2015 as director of ambulatory systems, implementing an EHR for the organization’s ambulatory practices and driving the health system’s interoperability strategy before advancing through roles as assistant vice president of applications, integrations and data, and deputy CIO prior to assuming the CIO role. She began her health IT career in 2006 at the Primary Care Coalition of Montgomery County, where she built a reputation for successfully leading complex EHR transitions and deploying analytics tools to improve outcomes. Her deep understanding of both clinical and business workflows, combined with a strong background in IT platforms, has earned her several industry awards throughout her career. Ms. Dorazio currently serves as co-chair of Mercy Health Clinic in Montgomery County, Md.

Keisha Downes. Vice President of Mid-Revenue Cycle at Beth Israel Lahey Health (Cambridge, Mass.). Ms. Downes provides strategic and operational leadership across clinical documentation improvement, hospital and professional coding and health information management operations. Her leadership spans 14 academic and community facilities with a team of 500-plus full time employees. She also serves on Beth Israel Lahey Health’s responsible AI use committee, contributing to evaluation and governance of emerging technologies across the enterprise. Ms. Downes drove $41.3 million in annual revenue impact through AI-enabled  clinical documentation improvement workflow optimization that earned executive recognition and supported expansion of her team. A former neurosurgical ICU nurse who transitioned into health IT leadership, she is completing a doctoral thesis focused on how AI can strengthen denial management without displacing human judgment in complex cases. She serves on the Association for Clinical Documentation Integrity Specialists advisory board and as a member of the HealthLeaders Revenue Cycle Mastermind, and is an adjunct professor at Purdue Global University. As a woman of color in an executive leadership role, she is deeply committed to mentoring emerging professionals from underrepresented backgrounds.

Laura Dubay. Vice President of Epic Patient Care Manager at Parkview Health (Fort Wayne, Ind.). Ms. Dubay oversees a team of approximately 100 information systems leaders, analysts, specialists and consultants responsible for advancing patient-centered technology across Parkview Health and its community connect partners. Ms. Dubay played a critical role in enabling Parkview to become the world’s first health system to receive seven diamonds in Epic’s “MyChart Diamonds” program, reflecting not just implementation but sustained, high-level usage across patient activation, communication and self-scheduling. Parkview is continuing to push toward an eighth diamond, which would again be a world first. More recently, Ms. Dubay has led implementation of “Emmie,” Epic’s AI assistant for patients, which delivers personalized guidance grounded in each patient’s actual medical record. She also led the omni-channel communication project “Hello World,” standardizing Parkview’s communication platforms from a patient perspective. Parkview has earned KLAS “Arch Pinnacle Award” recognition in 2025, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” level 10 status for 12 consecutive years and Epic “Honor Roll” recognition for five consecutive years.

Annemarie Eades. CIO at Saint Anthony Hospital System (Chicago). Ms. Eades is accountable for enterprise IT strategy, operations, cybersecurity and digital transformation across Saint Anthony Hospital System and its affiliated clinics, partnering with executive leadership to advance quality, access, affordability and clinician experience. Ms. Eades delivered a multidisciplinary “Charge Capture” initiative to standardize clinical documentation, optimize EHR build and embed revenue integrity reviews. This project increased reimbursement accuracy while reducing downstream rework. She also led a managed care contract review project in partnership with the finance and revenue cycle teams, developing payer analytics, contract terms inventory and performance dashboards to identify underpayments and opportunities for improved reimbursement rates. She consolidated and renegotiated service provider contracts, rationalized licenses and eliminated duplicative services, driving significant annual cost savings and tighter vendor performance service level agreements. Ms. Eades has also advanced the organization’s cybersecurity posture in alignment with regulatory standards; strengthened identity and access management, device security, incident response and disaster recovery testing; and optimized enterprise EHR workflows and clinician experience through standardized integrations and health information exchange connectivity. She established executive key performance indicator dashboards, implemented IT governance and portfolio management, clarified roles, structured operating rhythms and built professional development pathways. 

Nasim Eftekhari. System Vice President, Chief AI and Analytics Officer at City of Hope (Duarte, Calif.). Ms. Eftekhari built City of Hope’s AI program from the ground up, rising from individual contributor to chief AI and analytics officer and leading a horizontally integrated applied AI and data ccience department that improves efficiency and quality across clinical decision support, patient care, research, precision medicine and core business operations. In 2025, she led development and deployment of “HopeLLM,” a novel generative AI platform that streamlines patient onboarding, matches patients to clinical trials and transforms clinical decision-making across City of Hope’s network, which treats over 168,000 patients annually. Her team’s real-time predictive models are embedded in the Epic EHR and enable proactive risk detection for sepsis and surgical complications, with measured impact including reduced ICU admissions and lower rates of postoperative complications. Ms. Eftekhari was named to AIM Media‘s “AI100” and Chief Data Officer Magazine‘s 2025 “40 Under 40 Data Leaders” list. A computer scientist by training, she leads AI-driven tools for revenue cycle optimization contributing to margin growth alongside clinical and research capabilities.

Kelly Etnier. Vice President of Data Analytics and AI at Parkview Health (Fort Wayne, Ind.). Ms. Etnier leads enterprisewide analytics, data strategy and digital transformation at Parkview Health, setting the vision for how data, reporting and advanced analytics drive better clinical, financial and operational decisions. Ms. Etnier is known for her thoroughness in fully evaluating situations, understanding root causes and thinking through downstream impacts before proposing solutions. She leads with a combination of strategic intelligence and emotional intelligence, quickly understanding complex business problems, connecting operational realities to longer-term strategy, and translating complexity into clear direction for her teams while building an environment where people feel valued and supported. Parkview Health was named one of the “World’s Best Hospitals” by Newsweek and is a consistent KLAS, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and Epic “Honor Roll” award recipient, including seven diamonds in Epic’s “MyChart Diamonds” program under related technology leadership.

Jill Evans. CNIO at The MetroHealth System (Cleveland). Ms. Evans is an American Nurses Credentialing Center board-certified nursing informatics leader who brings expert knowledge of clinical practice, regulatory requirements and evidence-based best practices to the clinical systems function at The MetroHealth System. She has served the system for 15 years and has been in her current role since July 2023. Ms. Evans has applied deep experience in process reengineering to strategic initiatives and operational transformation, and serves as a virtual care leader. In this role, she creates, manages and grows programs within the MetroHealth virtual care enterprise, spanning virtual chronic disease management, virtual nursing, hospital in the home and telehealth. Her background bridges clinical practice and health IT, enabling her to translate frontline care delivery realities into technology solutions that improve workflows, support regulatory compliance and advance evidence-based care across the system.

Amy Feaster. CDIO at Children’s Hospital Colorado (Aurora, Colo.). Ms. Feaster led more than 240 major IT projects in 2025 alone at Children’s Hospital Colorado, which serves more than 300,000 children annually. The system has earned recognition as the only health system to achieve top-tier performance in Epic’s “Honor Roll” for six consecutive years and for generating more than $2 million in Epic incentives. Ms. Feaster made Children’s Hospital Colorado the first pediatric health system to achieve 10 gold stars in Epic’s “Gold Star” program, and led the organization to Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Davies Award” and “Most Wired Award” recognition. Her financial stewardship led to $107 million in increased charge capture across five years, over $30 million in cost avoidance and over $57 million in accelerated cash flow, alongside patient access improvements, including 110,000 self-scheduled appointments and $71 million collected through digital services. She has also led more than 50 AI-driven solutions that improve clinical decision-making and reduce clinician workload, and developed one of the most robust business continuity and disaster recovery programs in the nation. Children’s Hospital Colorado has been ranked a “Top 10 Children’s Hospital” nationally by U.S. News & World Report for the past three years.

Kelsey Fitzgerald. Director of Strategic Operations for the Department of Nursing at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.). Ms. Fitzgerald embeds product thinking, governance and innovation infrastructure directly into clinical practice at Mayo Clinic’s department of nursing, designing and implementing a product-centric operating model across six dimensions of maturity that align technology initiatives with clinical strategy, measurable outcomes and frontline needs. Ms. Fitzgerald architected and launched a scaled agile-based quarterly planning process that boosted resource allocation to strategic priorities by 39% in year one and accelerated cycle time delivery by three months. She designed and operationalized “Nursing Innovation Connect,” creating a structured pathway for clinician-led innovation that surfaced three patent-pending concepts and six know-how agreements with market potential. A smartphone platform revitalization she led resulted in 88% adoption among 12,000 clinicians, $1.3 million in annual savings and an improvement of 24 minutes per shift in care efficiency, and she introduced a mobile-first Epic MyChart experience that eliminated costly tablets, expanded education content 11x and reduced nursing time by 15 minutes per day.

Emily Flahaven, MSN, RN. Associate Vice President and CNIO at UT Southwestern Medical Center (Dallas). Ms. Flahaven provides executive leadership for nursing informatics strategy and digital innovation at UT Southwestern Medical Center, collaborating across the health system to ensure technology effectively supports nursing practice, interprofessional care, patient safety, clinical quality and operational excellence. Ms. Flahaven joined UT Southwestern in 2014 and has held progressive leadership roles in nursing informatics, including director of nursing informatics, before advancing to her current role as associate vice president and CNIO. Before entering informatics leadership, she practiced as a registered nurse providing direct patient care for more than 11 years, a clinical foundation that informs her approach to ensuring technology solutions are grounded in the realities of frontline care delivery.

Kristy Fogle. Clinical Director of the Center for Virtual Care at LifeBridge Health (Baltimore). Ms. Fogle, a physician assistant with a background in emergency medicine, leads LifeBridge Health’s smart hospital initiatives across acute and post-acute settings, overseeing the design, implementation and optimization of technology-enabled care models including virtual nursing, virtual consulting, ambient patient monitoring, remote patient monitoring and digital command center operations. Ms. Fogle was central to clinically and operationally building LifeBridge Health’s first center for virtual care, which evolved from a Covid-era rapid-response model into a permanent systemwide smart hospital strategy spanning inpatient and post-acute environments. She oversees an asynchronous care platform and remote patient monitoring programs for chronic disease management and transitional care, including a centralized clinical team operating across the U.S. and Israel with standardized protocols and communication pathways for safe, consistent outcomes. Her dual perspective as a practicing clinician and operational leader ensures that digital tools are evaluated through the lens of bedside realities, guaranteeing they are safe, scalable and genuinely supportive of clinicians under pressure.

Renee Fosberg. Senior Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Emerson Health (Concord, Mass.). Ms. Fosberg leads information systems, clinical informatics, infrastructure, telecommunications, clinical engineering and information security at Emerson Health, with a defining accomplishment in leading the successful integration of Emerson Health’s digital ecosystem, which transitioned more than 70 affiliated physician practices onto a single Epic EHR platform. Ms. Fosberg’s oversight of cybersecurity, telecommunications and clinical engineering ensures that Emerson Health operates on a secure and resilient foundation, and her focus on practical innovation prioritizes solutions that can be integrated into daily workflows and deliver measurable results, work that has helped the system maintain repeated the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” designation. Emerson Health was named a 2026 national ORBIE Awards “Healthcare Finalist” and a 2025 BostonCIO ORBIE Awards “Nonprofit/Public Sector Winner,” and has received Healthgrades “Patient Safety Excellence” and “Outstanding Patient Experience” awards.

Priscilla A. Frase, MD. Interim Director of IT and CMIO at Ozarks Healthcare (West Plains, Mo.). Dr. Frase has served on Ozarks Healthcare’s IT team since 2014, bridging clinical, regulatory and financial aspects of care while still practicing as a hospitalist in a limited capacity. In recent years, she received the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Innovator of the Year Award” and the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Senior Executive Changemaker Award” in 2024. Her initiatives in problem list management, order set governance and provider education have produced measurable results: according to KLAS research, Ozarks improved its net EHR Experience score for providers by 48 points after implementing Meditech Expanse, with nurse satisfaction rising 24 points, and subsequent surveys showed continued improvement, with the organization ranking in the 100th percentile in seven out of 10 EHR support metrics. Dr. Frase also led the health system to become a certified community behavioral health clinic and to add a crisis stabilization center. She is a fellow of the American College of Health Data Management and a participant in Meditech’s user-centered design team.

Penelope Fu, MD. Chief Health Informatics Officer at Michigan Medicine (Ann Arbor). Dr. Fu assumed the role of chief health informatics officer at Michigan Medicine in April 2026, bringing a track record of improving healthcare services through innovative use of clinical informatics and health IT in academic medical centers and large integrated health systems. She applies design thinking and human-centered design principles to her work and has previously held roles as CMIO, CIO, division chief for pediatric hospital medicine, fellowship director, co-lead for a Clinical and Translational Science Institute informatics core and health system research informatics lead. Before joining Michigan Medicine, Dr. Fu spent seven years at Duarte, Calif.-based City of Hope. Dr. Fu is recognized for building high-performing teams, fostering strong stakeholder relationships at all levels and aligning complex organizations toward strategic goals.

Breanda Goralski. Vice President of Applications at BayCare Health System (Clearwater, Fla.). Ms. Goralski leads strategy, performance and governance for more than 350 enterprise applications supporting clinical, financial and administrative operations across BayCare Health System, an academic nonprofit health care system. With more than two decades of service, Ms. Goralski has advanced from systems analyst to vice president by consistently aligning technology strategy with clinical, operational and organizational priorities. She led an enterprise registration and scheduling implementation that unified previously fragmented systems and improved patient access, established BayCare’s systemwide automation council, and created dedicated roles focused on automation and AI architecture. Ms. Goralski also served as executive sponsor of a major enterprise resource management migration to the cloud and played a key leadership role in a complex, multi-phase systemwide picture archiving and communication system replacement. She provides leadership oversight of data analytics, software engineering, population health applications and the information services project management office across BayCare’s more than 100 clinical facilities. In 2025, BayCare earned Fortune‘s “Best Workplaces in Health Care” recognition and multiple Healthgrades and Press Ganey honors for patient experience.

Kim Gordon. Senior Vice President of Care Delivery Applications at Corewell Health (Grand Rapids, Mich.). Ms. Gordon provides strategic leadership for applications and platforms unique to Corewell Health’s care delivery operations, leading 60 teams and overseeing clinical technology and applications including informatics and training for Michigan’s largest healthcare organization, with 21 hospitals and more than 5,000 licensed beds. Under her leadership, Corewell Health teams integrated three legacy Epic instances into a single instance, and less than a year after completing the integration, the organization earned Epic level 9 gold stars for configuration and usage, as well as Epic “Honor Roll” and Epic “Community Connect” accreditation. Her teams completed 34 targeted interventions that eliminated 780,000 Epic alerts annually, saving 2,600 hours per month for frontline team members, and also completed a systemwide rollout of Abridge ambient listening, resulting in physicians spending 50% less time on after-hours documentation. Corewell Health has earned the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” level 9 recognition in acute, ambulatory and long term post-acute care categories for three consecutive years, as well as a Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Davies Award of Excellence” in 2024.

Mandy Grubb Halford, MD. Senior Vice President, Chief Medical Officer and CMIO at Covenant Health (Knoxville, Tenn.). Dr. Grubb Halford has served as Covenant Health’s first CMIO since 2016 and assumed the additional role of chief medical officer in 2023, now providing medical leadership across Covenant’s delivery system while serving as the primary liaison to more than 1,500 affiliated physicians. Under her CMIO leadership, Covenant Health and Covenant Medical Group earned level 9 College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Digital Health Most Wired” designations in both acute and ambulatory categories in 2024 and 2025. Dr. Halford led the implementation of Covenant’s integrated EHR, overseeing tele-ICU services at all nine acute care hospitals and expanding the clinical informatics leadership team to sustain ongoing optimization. She co-leads the continuing medical education program, co-developed the Methodist Family Medicine Residency Program and helped open a family medicine clinic expanding primary care access in the region. Board certified in both internal medicine and clinical informatics, she was honored by the YWCA Knoxville and the Tennessee Valley for excellence in science, health and technology.

Karen Habercoss. Vice President and Chief Information Security and Privacy Officer at University of Chicago Medicine (Chicago). Ms. Habercoss leads a unified privacy and security function across the UChicago Medicine academic health system, covering three hospitals, the biological sciences research division, a clinically integrated network, an accountable care organization, occupational and student health clinics, and three self-insured health plans. Since assuming privacy leadership, Ms. Habercoss has built measurable program scale, with incident report capture increasing more than 300% in three years, audits performed increasing more than 200% and training opportunities expanding more than 500%. A former licensed clinical social worker who practiced at UChicago Medicine for 13 years before transitioning into compliance, then privacy, then enterprise information security leadership, she brings a human-centric approach that has defined her national speaking and writing profile, including more than 50 presentations and keynotes since 2021 at venues including Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, ViVE and Gartner CISO summits. She holds nine professional certifications across privacy, security, compliance and AI governance. In addition, she serves as elected chair of the Association of American Medical Colleges’ compliance officer forum and immediate past chair of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society cybersecurity and privacy committee. In 2025, she received the “A100 Award” from CISOs Connect as one of the top 100 accelerated CISOs nationally.

Nikki Harper. Division Chair of AI, Analytics and Diversified Revenue at Mayo Clinic (Rochester, Minn.). Ms. Harper holds strategic and operational oversight for revenue cycle finance and staffing, analytics, business partner engagement, and AI and automation at Mayo Clinic, including the laboratories revenue cycle. Ms. Harper has led many Epic implementations for revenue cycle throughout her career and is advancing a strategic vision to increase patient satisfaction, decrease physician administrative burden and decrease cost to collect, an approach she describes as building an AI-enabled, human-centered team. Her leadership in reshaping departments around AI and analytics capabilities is helping define the workforce of the future within healthcare finance. She also serves on the Healthcare Financial Management Association national board of directors. Prior to Mayo Clinic, she served as enterprise vice president of patient finance services at Livonia, Mich.-based Trinity Health and system vice president of revenue cycle at Springfield, Ill.-based Hospital Sisters Health System.

Erin Hash. Vice President of IT at Clarinda (Iowa) Regional Health Center. Ms. Hash leads all aspects of technology infrastructure, cybersecurity and information systems at Clarinda Regional Health Center, aligning IT initiatives with organizational goals to support high-quality patient care, regulatory compliance and operational efficiency. Ms. Hash brings a clinical foundation to her IT leadership, having worked as a nurse and later a clinical analyst. She has guided the organization through cybersecurity threats, system downtimes and complex technology transitions, applying a proactive approach that emphasizes staff awareness, rapid response protocols and infrastructure hardening to significantly strengthen the organization’s security posture. Ms. Hash is also recognized for building a strong, service-oriented IT culture through mentorship, clear expectations and professional development, resulting in improved team engagement, responsiveness and cross-department collaboration. Clarinda Regional Health Center has maintained compliance with CMS conditions of participation and DNV accreditation requirements, and achieved measurable improvements in quality outcomes, staff engagement and service delivery over the past three years. Earlier in her career, Ms. Hash held progressive IT leadership and management roles overseeing infrastructure, system implementation and technical support services in healthcare environments.

Tamera Hatfield, MD. Associate CMIO at UCI Health (Orange, Calif.). Dr. Hatfield is the associate CMIO at UCI Health and a board-certified, fellowship-trained maternal-fetal medicine physician who partners with physician, nursing and operational leaders across inpatient service lines to translate frontline needs into safer, more efficient workflows. She was at the forefront of a new EHR implementation across six hospitals, leading a full-scale, EHR-centric unified communications transformation that streamlined provider and nursing communication through secure messaging, EHR-integrated phone calling, code and critical result notifications and nurse call system integration. Dr. Hatfield implemented an electronic surgical consent platform that achieved more than 90% adoption and championed end-to-end integration of an inpatient telehealth module enabling cross-site subspecialty consultation. She is also an associate professor in the division of maternal-fetal medicine and the department of obstetrics and gynecology at the UC Irvine School of Medicine. UCI Health earned the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives  level 7 “Most Wired” recognition in 2023, a Leapfrog hospital safety grade of “A” in spring 2024, and was recognized on multiple Newsweek and U.S. News & World Report rankings.

Geri Hansen, MSN, RN. Vice President of Information Systems Applications at Baptist Health (Jacksonville, Fla.). Ms. Hansen, a board-certified bedside nurse for nearly a decade who successfully transitioned to hospital-based IT, oversees development, implementation and optimization of Baptist Health’s application landscape as an integral member of the IT leadership team. Earlier this year, Ms. Hansen was instrumental in helping Baptist Health achieve “summa cum laude” status in Epic’s “Version 9 Honor Roll Grant Program” across nine key areas, including provider and nurse usability, financial operations and population health. She also played a key role in Baptist Health’s enterprise upgrade and gradual nationwide rollout of MyChart Central, a feature allowing patients to access all MyChart accounts from different healthcare providers using one set of credentials. Baptist Health has earned the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives Digital Health “Most Wired” level 10 designation in 2024 and 2025, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Community Care Outcomes Maturity Model” stage 7 validation in 2024 and recognition as a “Best Places to Work in IT” organization by Foundry’s Computerworld.

Stephanie Hines, RN. Senior Vice President and CIO at Valleywise Health (Phoenix). Ms. Hines joined Valleywise Health in October 2024 as senior vice president and CIO, and in her first year helped the organization achieve its first Epic “Honor Roll” designation while advancing Epic gold stars performance from level 4 to an expected level 8 through rigorous workflow improvements. Ms. Hines oversaw the establishment of an AI strategy and governance framework and began responsible adoption of high-impact tools including ambient documentation, Epic LaunchPad and Microsoft Copilot, while simultaneously increasing infrastructure resiliency through prioritized cybersecurity programs and strengthened access controls. She also developed business cases and readiness plans for major enterprise transformations slated to begin in July 2026. A registered nurse who previously worked in a level 1 trauma center, Ms. Hines brings experience from Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health and Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health, where she led large-scale Epic EHR improvements. She is board-certified in nursing informatics and a certified healthcare CIO.

Rebecca Kohler. CNIO at UW Health (Madison, Wis.). Ms. Kohler serves as the inaugural CNIO for UW Health, shaping the role and strategic influence of clinical and nursing informatics and technology education across a large academic health system, all while leading the clinical informatics and education team and the information services organizational change management teams. Ms. Kohler led the integration and transformation of nursing informatics, education, optimization and support into a unified, enterprise-focused service model and championed enterprise standardization of nursing documentation and workflows, improving alignment across inpatient and ambulatory environments. She provides nursing leadership in clinical AI governance, ensuring safety, effectiveness, compliance and appropriate nursing engagement, and has sponsored the adoption of innovative nursing technologies including virtual nursing, mobile communication platforms, workload scoring and AI-enabled clinical tools. She chairs the Health Level leader council, co-chairs the clinical operations technology workgroup, and serves on the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society nursing informatics council board. UW Health was ranked No. 1 in Wisconsin by U.S. News & World Report for 14 consecutive years and was named to Newsweek and Statista’s “World’s Best Smart Hospitals” 2025 list.

Lauren Koniaris, MD. Vice President and CMIO at Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.). Dr. Koniaris leads clinical informatics strategy across the largest healthcare network in New Jersey, overseeing a team of 26, including 11 clinical informaticists. She also serves as interim head of Hackensack Meridian Health’s data and analytics department, which oversees real-time dashboards, reporting tools, data catalogs and the safe, effective and ethical development and deployment of advanced AI and predictive analytics. She led the “Epic Refuel” project that implemented more than 600 features across the health network, an initiative already producing successful metrics demonstrated by Epic gold stars. Dr. Koniaris also chairs the AI advisory committee and oversees AI governance to ensure the safe and effective deployment of AI tools, including ambient documentation and predictive analytics. She previously led the “Thrive at the Bedside” initiative, which streamlined EHR workflows and enhanced efficiency for physicians and nurses across the system. Board certified in clinical informatics, pulmonary medicine and critical care medicine, Dr. Koniaris also serves as an assistant professor of medicine at the Hackensack Meridian School of Medicine, where she co-directs the Phase I “Infection, Immunity and Cancer” course. Hackensack University Medical Center ranked No. 1 in New Jersey and No. 1 in the New York Metro Area in the 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings, and Hackensack Meridian Health was recognized by the Lown Institute as the top nonprofit health system in the nation for giving back to the communities it serves.

Trecia Landrum. Vice President of Enterprise Applications at Children’s National Hospital (Washington, D.C.). Ms. Landrum provides executive leadership for two of Children’s National Hospital’s most ambitious enterprise transformations, the Epic EHR modernization initiative known as “Epic Forward” and a Workday/UKG workforce transformation. In addition, she is tasked with overseeing the overall health, performance and optimization of the organization’s full application ecosystem. Ms. Landrum treats these efforts not as isolated technology implementations but as enterprisewide opportunities to strengthen how the organization operates, collaborates and delivers care, establishing clear governance structures, disciplined execution frameworks and shared accountability across clinical, operational and technical leaders. She is also a dedicated mentor and sponsor, investing in emerging leaders both within Children’s National and external mentoring programs. Before joining Children’s National, Ms. Landrum served as director of Epic revenue cycle applications at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins, director of the information systems project management office at Atlanta-based Piedmont Healthcare and manager of Epic revenue cycle applications at Piedmont Healthcare.

Kathy LeBrew. Executive Vice President and Chief Transformation Officer at Fairview (Minneapolis). Ms. LeBrew leads strategic transformation at Fairview, identifying and capturing opportunities to improve outcomes and operations across the health system. Ms. LeBrew joined Fairview in 2021, bringing more than 35 years of experience building and leading teams in health systems and physician organizations across the country, with a track record of improving net revenue, patient experience and sustainable outcomes. Before joining Fairview, she served as chief system revenue cycle officer and vice president of IT at University Hospitals in Cleveland, and as corporate vice president of both revenue cycle operations and IT at West Penn Allegheny Health System in Pittsburgh. Her background lends her a distinctive dual lens across financial performance and technology strategy.

Kristine Lee, MD. Associate Executive Director at The Permanente Medical Group (Pleasanton, Calif.). Dr. Lee oversees virtual and desktop medicine, technology, innovation and research across primary care and all specialties at The Permanente Medical Group, with a focus on using technology to manage patient chronic conditions and physician in-basket burden. Dr. Lee is leading an exploration of digital twin technology, using AI to assemble data from wearables, sensors and patient reports and translate it into personalized actions, with participants experiencing lower weight and A1C levels. She also oversaw development of the medical group’s virtual medical center, an integrated telehealth hub that addressed 5.7 million patient concerns in its first full year of operation in 2025. The medical group completed deployment of ambient AI scribe technology to all its clinicians in early 2025, and Dr. Lee continues to customize workflows across settings and specialties to enhance care quality. The organization received gold-level recognition from the American Medical Association’s “Joy in Medicine” program for these technology initiatives.

Jennifer Lewis. Vice President of Enterprise Applications and Products at Hartford (Conn.) HealthCare. Ms. Lewis is a vital member of the IT leadership team responsible for enabling technology support across eight hospitals, 500 clinical sites and more than 48,000 colleagues at Hartford HealthCare. In the past year, the system launched “HHC 24/7,” an application providing virtual primary care visits around the clock that logged more than 50,000 interactions in its first year of operation. Ms. Lewis has successfully directed a wide range of complex, enterprise-level programs, including Hartford HealthCare’s operational partnership with Google, delivering coordinated outcomes that advance the organization’s digital and operational priorities. She also leads the system’s project management office, and provides clear oversight and direction to a team of project management professionals. Hartford HealthCare received the 2025 American Hospital Association “Quest for Quality Prize” and earned an “A” safety grade from Leapfrog nine consecutive times. In January 2026, it became the first health system in the nation to have all its cancer centers recognized as “MSK Care Partners.”

Jennifer Magaziner. Vice President for Digital Health at Boston Children’s Hospital. Ms. Magaziner holds operational and strategic responsibility for the digital infrastructure that shapes how patients access and receive complex pediatric care at Boston Children’s, overseeing digital channels that have collectively delivered over a million patient visits since launch and leading the hospital’s virtual care program. Ms. Magaziner grounds digital innovation in three integrated commitments: systems thinking that treats digital as a systemic patient experience issue rather than an operational metric; human-centered design that asks whether a solution genuinely reduces friction for the families who need care most; and a commitment to equitable access, ensuring the digital front door opens for all patients regardless of language, digital fluency or connectivity. She evaluates emerging technologies, including AI-assisted triage tools, remote patient monitoring platforms and next-generation scheduling systems, using the practical lens of whether they make care faster, clearer or more accessible for families. Boston Children’s has been ranked No. 1 or No. 2 in U.S. News & World Report‘s “Best Children’s Hospitals” for 19 consecutive years, and is the only institution to be rated No. 1 in the Newsweek “World’s Best Specialized Hospitals” for pediatrics in 2026.

Kim Malinowski. Assistant Vice President of Regional IT at Orlando (Fla.) Health. Ms. Malinowski is a registered nurse with more than 14 years of bedside experience and more than 15 years in IT, bringing a dual clinical-technical perspective to her leadership of IT and clinical engineering across acute care hospitals, ambulatory sites and physician offices at Orlando Health. Ms. Malinowski led efforts to reduce burdensome nursing documentation across the system, achieving an 18% reduction in sections, a 39% reduction in questions and a 31% reduction in clicks, thus saving nurses an average of 15 minutes and 30 seconds per admission. In 2024, she assumed the role of regional IT leader for Orlando Health’s integration of newly acquired hospitals on Florida’s Space Coast, overseeing the implementation of Epic and more than 70 third-party systems across two hospitals, outpatient ambulatory locations and physician practices. Her team completed the physician office Epic go-live in six months and the hospital implementations in nine months. She also founded Orlando Health’s nursing informatics program in 2019 and has served as the IT clinical lead for virtual nursing, virtual sitting, documentation reduction and IV pump integration across 10 hospitals, freestanding emergency departments and infusion centers. Orlando Health has earned the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” level 10 recognition in both acute and ambulatory categories, Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Stage 7” designation and Epic “Gold Stars” level 10.

Nicole Martinez. CNIO at RWJBarnabas Health (West Orange, N.J.). Ms. Martinez oversees key partnerships and strategic plans to optimize clinical care across the largest health care system in New Jersey, leading the Nursing and Allied Health Collaborative of more than 650 clinical operation members responsible for assessing and prioritizing all clinically related changes across the system. Over the past year, Ms. Martinez helped spearhead integration of Epic’s AI cognitive computing early warning system for patient deterioration across the system, contributing to an estimated 500 lives saved since April 2023. She also addressed a systemwide IV fluid shortage crisis, establishing data-driven procedures that produced a sustained 40% reduction in overall product usage, with non-trauma facilities reporting closer to a 70% reduction, and enabled the system to postpone less than 1% of all procedures. Her work with the Nursing and Allied Health Collaborative in partnership with the clinical analyst team has resulted in more than 1,500 evidence-based clinical optimizations to the EHR in the past year alone. RWJBarnabas Health achieved Epic “Gold Stars” recognition faster than any other customer in Epic’s 43-year history.

Jayshree Maurantonio. Senior IT Director at White Plains Hospital (White Plains, N.Y.). Ms. Maurantonio serves as the technology backbone of White Plains Hospital, which has nearly doubled its staff to 6,000 since 2019 and now operates more than 50 outpatient practices across more than 30 locations. Ms. Maurantonio’s team manages 2,800 computers deployed to support the Epic EHR system and nearly 400 WiFi access points across the hospital campus, while overseeing electronic whiteboards in the ICU, enterprise imaging integrated with Epic and MyChart, AI-assisted 3D imaging for vascular surgeons and AI rendering in mammography. She led the full replacement of Meditech with Epic across clinical and operational systems without disrupting patient care, and simultaneously built the entire IT infrastructure for the Center for Advanced Medicine and Surgery, which opened during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2021. Ms. Maurantonio is also leading the IT buildout for the hospital’s 10-story, nearly 500,000-square-foot expansion scheduled to open in 2028, and is currently guiding a systemwide migration from on-site data centers to the cloud. White Plains Hospital earned a CMS 5-star quality rating for the fourth consecutive year in 2025.

Katherine McNeill. Assistant Vice President of Information Systems and Technology Business Operations at Jefferson Health (Philadelphia). Ms. McNeill has more than 30 years of healthcare IT experience at Jefferson Health, one of the top 15 nonprofit health systems in the country, currently overseeing all of information systems and technology business operations for the combined Jefferson-Lehigh Valley Health Network IS&T organization, which includes 32 hospitals, more than 700 sites of care and 65,000 employees. She also manages an IT budget of nearly $500 million. Ms. McNeill elevated the information systems and technology project management office from a single-hospital team to an organization supporting 18 hospitals and more than 300 projects, standardizing project management principles and operational governance across the enterprise. She led Thomas Jefferson University Hospital to early achievement of “Meaningful Use Stage 1” and guided her team to achieve the 2023 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “Enterprise Davies Award,” as well as the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” level 10 recognition in 2022 and 2023. Following Jefferson’s merger with Lehigh Valley Health Network, she facilitated the reorganization of two information systems and technology teams into a single unified organization.

Amy Leigh Miller, MD, PhD. CHIO at Beth Israel Lahey Health (Cambridge, Mass.). Dr. Miller led the multi-year rollout of a unified EHR across Beth Israel Lahey Health, bringing 14 hospitals that had long operated on disparate systems onto a single Epic instance, a complex systemwide effort that required coordination and deep trust with clinical and operational leaders across one of New England’s largest health systems. With that unified EHR in place, Dr. Miller has shifted the system’s focus toward unlocking the full value of data to improve patient care, maintaining a dual commitment to clinician advocacy and patient safety. She was also instrumental in implementing an AI scribe tool for physicians across the system, achieving high satisfaction rates and meaningful reductions in administrative burden. Prior to joining the system, Dr. Miller served as associate CMIO at Somerville, Mass.-based Partners Healthcare and executive director of clinical informatics for the Partners Healthcare Epic implementation.

Rebecca Mishuris, MD. CMIO and Vice President at Mass General Brigham (Boston). Dr. Mishuris leads vision, strategy and implementation of digital solutions aligned with enterprise strategies at Mass General Brigham, ensuring the delivery of high-quality, safe, equitable and efficient care while enhancing the patient and care team experience. A practicing primary care physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a member of the faculty at Harvard Medical School, Dr. Mishuris brings a clinician’s perspective to one of the nation’s largest health systems. Her research focuses on the intersection of technology and the quintuple aim of healthcare, with a current emphasis on the role of digital solutions in physician wellbeing, quality and equity. Before joining Mass General Brigham in February 2023, she served as CMIO at Boston Medical Center for nearly nine years, alongside various medical informatics leadership positions spanning assistant chief to clinical lead. Earlier in her career, Dr. Mishuris served as assistant professor of medicine at Boston University School of Medicine and held fellow and instructor roles at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Boston University.

Billie Jean Mounts. Chief Revenue Officer at Bon Secours Mercy Health (Cincinnati). Ms. Mounts leads the revenue management team at Bon Secours Mercy Health, overseeing managed care, government reimbursement and revenue cycle for a $10 billion integrated healthcare system operating across Ohio, Kentucky, Virginia and South Carolina. Ms. Mounts brings more than 20 years of experience with Medicare and Medicaid cost reporting for hospitals, skilled nursing facilities, rural health clinics and home health agencies, and has demonstrated expertise navigating complex reimbursement environments through mergers, acquisitions and organizational restructuring. She developed key performance indicators for the reimbursement team to measure performance and improvement over time, effectively synthesizes revenue cycle operational data with monthly financial reporting results, and regularly presents to executive management and board-level audiences. Ms. Mounts evaluates future growth opportunities and conducts due diligence to support mergers and acquisitions, while also serving as a change agent by demonstrating the value of reimbursement strategy to proposed operational changes. She represents Bon Secours Mercy Health on national Healthcare Financial Management Association committees and state hospital association initiatives, and is a frequent thought leader through conference presentations, roundtables and podcasts.

Deb Muro. CIO of El Camino Health (Mountain View, Calif.). Ms. Muro has revolutionized patient engagement at El Camino Health by championing a seamless “digital front door” strategy that integrates mobile apps, ambient listening, online scheduling and chatbots into a frictionless care experience. Her innovations have driven El Camino’s recognition as a top-tier EHR organization, while transforming radiology workflows with AI that saves clinicians hours per shift. Ms. Muro’s consumer-focused vision includes extending the health system’s EHR to community-based physicians and deploying cloud-first infrastructure to ensure long-term reliability. Her leadership has earned her numerous honors, including the Bay Area ORBIE “CIO of the Year” award and YWCA “Tribute to Women Leadership” award. A respected national speaker, she has presented keynotes about innovative ways to reimagine healthcare at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and Reuters Digital Health. Ms. Muro is best known for her relentless drive to remove barriers and mentor rising leaders.

Kristin Myers. Executive Vice President and Chief Digital Officer at Northwell Health (New Hyde Park, N.Y.). Ms. Myers is the inaugural chief digital officer of Northwell Health, the largest health system in New York State. She’s responsible for enterprise digital services spanning digital experience, enterprise data and analytics, AI and intelligent automation, enterprise application strategy, infrastructure, cybersecurity, clinical informatics, interoperability and IT shared services across approximately $23 billion in operating revenue and more than 106,000 employees. In 2024, she spearheaded the launch of Northwell’s AI hub, a centralized secure platform that has attracted more than 39,000 users and facilitated more than 24 million interactions, providing access to 14 AI models and advanced conversational AI capabilities. Ms. Myers also led Northwell’s Epic “Wave 1” implementation, impacting approximately 39,000 users across eight hospitals, with integration with Salesforce enabling a 360-degree patient view and launching the myNorthwell app. She serves as a board member of the New York eHealth Collaborative, as a Salesforce Global CIO Customer advisory board member and as a Wall Street Journal technology council member. Previously, Ms. Myers served as executive vice president, CDIO, and dean for digital and IT at New York City-based Mount Sinai Health System.

Tina Myers. Vice President of Application Services at Prisma Health (Greenville, S.C.). Ms. Myers leads the strategy, implementation and optimization of enterprise clinical and business applications across South Carolina’s largest healthcare system, overseeing EHR and integrated clinical systems across a complex multi-hospital network. Ms. Myers has been instrumental in driving standardization and usability across clinical systems, helping reduce complexity for providers and improving workflows that support better patient experiences. These contributions helped Prisma Health earn multiple “A” Leapfrog hospital safety grades. Prior to joining Prisma Health in 2019, Ms. Myers spent 14 years at Cerner in progressive leadership roles, including director and consulting services executive, senior integration architect and senior solution architect, building the enterprise-scale expertise she now applies across one of the Southeast’s largest health systems. She also serves on the board of Palmetto Care Connections, supporting efforts to expand telehealth access across South Carolina.

Heather Nelson. Senior Vice President and CIO at Boston Children’s Hospital. Ms. Nelson leads a team of more than 470 IT and medical informatics professionals at Boston Children’s Hospital, having guided the organization through its Epic go-live in June 2024. Her work helped the system earn the prestigious 10 “Gold Stars” designation. She also helped Boston Children’s become the first pediatric institution to leverage a private 5G cellular distributed antenna system model to support clinical mobility. Ms. Nelson is now leading the hospital’s enterprise resource planning journey to Workday, as well as overseeing an enterprise AI governance framework to ensure that AI is implemented thoughtfully and responsibly in a healthcare setting. She has led a multi-year transformation of the IT organization, including restructuring teams, strengthening strategic vendor partnerships and reducing technical debt. Before Boston Children’s, she served as senior vice president and CIO at UChicago Medicine, where she oversaw enterprise IT strategy and operations supporting clinical innovation and large-scale organizational transformation. Boston Children’s was ranked No. 1 in U.S. News & World Report‘s 2025-26 “Best Children’s Hospitals Honor Roll.”

Jennifer Ngure, RN. Director of Clinical Informatics at Sturdy Health (Northboro, Mass.). Ms. Ngure simultaneously leads clinical informatics and AI adoption at Sturdy Health and runs Imara Health AI Consulting LLC, where she architects the “S.E.C.U.R.E.” framework and the “Human First. AI Second. Always” philosophy. These are proprietary methodologies for clinician-centered AI implementation aligned with regulatory standards. Ms. Ngure has led enterprise digital transformation across more than 500 healthcare facilities with $20 million or more in annual budgets, including a PointClickCare EHR deployment across 270-plus facilities and 30,000-plus beds at Five Star Senior Living that reduced clinical documentation errors by 50% and increased process efficiency by 50%. In 2026, she secured state approval for an “AI Literacy for Healthcare Workforce” course through the Massachusetts Workforce Training Fund Express Program, making her one of the few clinical informatics leaders simultaneously running AI inside a hospital, building state-approved AI literacy curriculum and creating a pipeline for nurses entering health tech. She founded RN2IT Academy, a 12-week accelerator transitioning frontline nurses into informatics careers, and serves as division director of health informatics at the Global Nursing AI Alliance. Ms. Ngure also authored “S.E.C.U.R.E. Your Workforce,” an Amazon bestseller in medical informatics.

Deepti Pandita, MD. Vice President for Clinical Informatics and Chief Medical Informatics and AI Officer at UCI Health (Orange, Calif.). Dr. Pandita leads UCI Health’s vision for leveraging generative and cognitive AI to augment the work of physicians, decrease burden and burnout, and shape a hospital of the future that integrates technology seamlessly for everyone in healthcare. She started the first clinical informatics fellowship in the state of Minnesota and was the first female program director of a clinical informatics fellowship in the country. At UCI Health, she was key in implementing AI to assist clinicians in responding to patient messages and led implementation of ambient listening tools that enable clinicians to focus more deeply on patients, particularly those with chronic disease or severe illness. Dr. Pandita set up UCI Health’s first-ever AI governance framework and has been a nationally recognized leader in bridging digital disparities, publishing opinion pieces and speaking at national meetings on ensuring digital solutions reach underserved and marginalized populations. She serves on the American Medical Informatics Association board, co-authored a recent American College of Physicians position paper on AI in healthcare and has previously chaired both the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society physician informatics committee and the American College of Physicians medical informatics committee.

Tracy Peffley. Vice President of Revenue Cycle for Cleveland Clinic. Ms. Peffley has been vice president of revenue cycle for Cleveland Clinic since 2025. There, she oversees all aspects of enterprisewide revenue cycle, including patient access support services, health information management, revenue resolution, patient financial experience and support services. She has been recognized by Epic for her revenue cycle management technology strategies. In addition, she heads a number of AI initiatives and offshore labor strategies for the system. She first joined Cleveland Clinic in 2013 as senior director of revenue cycle management. 

Sandra Powell-Elliott. Vice President and Chief Innovation and Commercialization Officer at Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.). Ms. Powell-Elliott is vice president and chief innovation and commercialization officer at Hackensack Meridian Health, where she advances internal innovation culture and external commercialization across precision medicine, devices, products, business models and operational improvement. She has spearheaded the development of Hackensack Meridian’s first spin-out company, called Evaluate Diagnostics, and supports innovation activity tied to the medical school and the system’s center for discovery and innovation. Ms. Powell-Elliott has scaled team-member-driven innovation through programs such as the “Bear’s Den Innovation Challenge” and networkwide challenges that have evaluated more than 400 submissions over three years, including a 2022 safety challenge engaging the system’s 36,000 team members. She helped launch “Emerge” in partnership with the State of New Jersey to accelerate early-stage technologies into U.S. healthcare delivery, beginning with an Ireland-focused cohort in 2024 and expanding in 2025 to more than 20 countries. Her portfolio also includes innovation-intensive programs targeting pediatrics, mental health, women’s health and pharmacy practice, alongside initiatives such as a genomic reference lab collaboration and ambulatory imaging joint ventures. 

Emily Reyes. CNIO and Director of Informatics at Children’s Hospital Colorado (Aurora). Ms. Reyes leads informatics strategy at Children’s Hospital Colorado, ensuring clinical information systems support the institution’s mission and strategic priorities while partnering closely with the CMIO, CIO and chief nurse executive to integrate technology solutions into clinical workflows and nursing practice. Ms. Reyes provides direct management over nine nurse informaticists and one pharmacy informaticist, serves as executive sponsor of the clinical informatics practice council and chairs the EHR governance committee. Her current quality improvement focus centers on leveraging EHR-based workload and nurse assignment tools to enhance patient assignments and staffing decisions. Before assuming her current role, Ms. Reyes spent nine years in progressive leadership positions at the hospital, including senior application manager, interim director of clinical applications and application manager. In the senior application manager role, she oversaw EHR clinical modules and more than 100 clinical application analysts, established an EHR optimization strategy in partnership with executive leadership, and mentored clinical application managers, supervisors and analysts. Children’s Hospital Colorado has been recognized as the No. 1 children’s hospital in the Rocky Mountain region by U.S. News & World Report for multiple consecutive years and was the first pediatric health system to achieve 10 gold stars in Epic’s “Gold Stars” program.

Donna Roach. System CDIO of University of Utah Health (Salt Lake City). Ms. Roach serves as CDIO of University of Utah Health. Prior to assuming the expanded role in January 2026, she was serving as CIO since 2020. Her expanded role means that she is now providing executive leadership and oversight of the system’s digital and IT infrastructure. Her innovative approach to healthcare has led to the implementation of transformative digital solutions, including improved interoperability, clinical automation and business innovation. In addition to her executive role at University of Utah Health, she co-chairs the system’s digital engagement committee, serves as a board member for the Utah Health Information Network and the KLAS advisory board, and is a lifetime fellow for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives. Thanks to her dedication to healthcare IT, Ms. Roach received the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “John A. Page Distinguished Fellows Service Changemaker” award in 2023. She has over 35 years of healthcare industry experience and most recently served as vice president for information services at St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare and Washington University Medical School.

Dana Schinasi, MD. Vice President, CMIO and Medical Director of Digital Health at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago. Dr. Schinasi serves as the physician bridge between technology and clinical care at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago, leading digital health strategy with a passion for evolving pediatric care delivery models. Her path to informatics leadership began when she recognized telemedicine’s potential to improve communication with patients and among medical staff, leading her to work on a pilot program with Northwestern Kellogg School of Management students exploring whether telemedicine could serve pediatric patients at outside facilities in lieu of transferring to the Lurie Children’s emergency department. That experience set her on a course of leaning into technology’s potential to streamline care, improve clinician and patient experience, and impact outcomes. Dr. Schinasi has since applied her informatics expertise to complex, real-world challenges, including leading Lurie Children’s through an unanticipated prolonged technological downtime, drawing on her training to bring people together and navigate the organization through the disruption. 

Anna Schoenbaum, DNP, RN-BC. Chief Digital Applications Officer at Penn Medicine (Philadelphia, Pa.). Dr. Schoenbaum leads enterprise strategy and execution for digital and application solutions, IT operations and training across Penn Medicine’s complex multi-hospital academic health system and school of medicine, with oversight of a $400 million operating and capital budget and a team of 500-plus IT professionals. She designed and implemented an enterprise operating model that unified applications, information services operations and training, eliminating silos and accelerating delivery. During her tenure, Penn Medicine has earned its 21st the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” recognition and multiple Epic “Honor Roll” distinctions. Dr. Schoenbaum led the “FAIRSTEPS” change control model for AI implementation, emphasizing clinical value, safety, governance and operational integrity. She serves as co-chair of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society global nursing innovation advisory workgroup, serves on the the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives executive informatics leadership council and contributes to national AI policy task forces, and was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing in 2024. She is also a published author on AI ethics, health equity and digital transformation, including an editorial in Nature, and was recognized with the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Alliance for Nursing Informatics “Nursing Informatics Changemaker” award.

Kopal Seth, MD. Associate CMIO at Phoenix Children’s. Dr. Seth is a practicing emergency medicine physician who has spent her career at Phoenix Children’s since 2007, translating frontline pediatric emergency medicine experience into practical, enterprisewide health IT improvements. She was instrumental in the transition from paper to electronic documentation in 2010 and has developed and optimized emergency department order sets, improving standardization, quality and care delivery speed. In her current health IT leadership role, Dr. Seth co-chairs Phoenix Children’s medical group EHR advisory council, evaluating and making decisions on clinical IT priorities. She is actively involved in efforts using ambient and AI-supported documentation approaches to increase efficiency, reduce documentation burden and return time to direct patient care. She also implemented provider barcode scanning for medication administration, a high-value safety practice, and served as emergency preparedness medical director. Phoenix Children’s earned recognition as a “Best Hospital IT Department” from Healthcare IT News.

Maria Sexton. Senior Vice President and CIO at University of Tennessee Medical Center (Knoxville). Serving as University of Tennessee Medical Center’s senior vice president and CIO since January 2025, Ms. Sexton is responsible for the strategic roadmap and day-to-day performance of information systems and digital technology services for the academic medical center. Reporting to the senior vice president and CFO, she leads enterprise priorities spanning infrastructure, EHR optimization, cybersecurity, regulatory compliance, virtual health growth, data governance and analytics to strengthen outcomes and operational efficiency. She is known for a security-first approach, supported by deep risk and audit expertise and advanced certifications. Drawing on leadership experience across gaming, entertainment, government and consumer goods, Ms. Sexton brings a multi-industry lens to healthcare IT strategy and resilience planning. Her communication-first leadership style emphasizes translating complex technology into clear, actionable terms for executives and frontline teams, helping align investment decisions with patient care realities. She also contributes nationally as a frequent speaker on cybersecurity preparedness and post-incident response, including presentations on “After the Breach: The 90 Days That Matter.” Immediately prior to joining the system, Ms. Sexton served as CIO for the Las Vegas-based University Medical Center of Southern Nevada.

Charlette Stallworth. Vice President of Business Development and Innovation at Stanford Children’s Health (Palo Alto, Calif.). Ms. Stallworth spearheads development and growth of partnerships that advance Stanford Children’s Health’s mission of providing the highest-quality pediatric healthcare, operating as part of the innovation network at Stanford Medicine to support development of new technologies advancing pediatric care. Ms. Stallworth’s team leverages AI, fosters strategic partnerships and balances digital innovation with patient-centered care and governance to advance the organization’s mission. In 2020, she was recognized as an “Emerging Industry Leader” by Managed Healthcare Executive, selected as an honoree for the Silicon Valley Golden Gate YWCA “Women Tribute Awards” and joined the executive board of the International Society for Pediatric Innovation. Before her career in healthcare, Ms. Stallworth served as a commercial banker and as a commissioned officer in the U.S. Army.

Jennifer Stemmler. CIO at Adventist Health (Roseville, Calif.). Ms. Stemmler leads IT, applications, cybersecurity and digital teams at Adventist Health. She’s currently spearheading one of the most ambitious projects in the system’s history, which is the Epic EHR implementation transitioning 27 hospitals and 400 clinics from Cerner to Epic in a single “big-bang” go-live, including leveraging Apple-Epic mobility tools to empower caregivers with real-time clinical data. Ms. Stemmler authored Adventist Health’s first “Consumer & Innovation Playbook,” a cornerstone in transforming the health and wellbeing journeys for patients, and previously led the transition of more than 280 ambulatory clinics from disparate systems and paper processes to Cerner Ambulatory. Under her leadership, Adventist Health Bill Pay now supports more than 229,000 registered users with 71% of payments made online, and enhancements including live chat and MagicLink text reminders drove 16,000 new registrations and a 10% increase in online payment activity in 2025. Adventist Health earned the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives “Most Wired” level 8 recognition.

Lisa Stephenson, MSN, RN. CNIO at Cedars-Sinai (Los Angeles). Ms. Stephenson became Cedars-Sinai’s CNIO in February 2025, leading the inpatient and ambulatory clinical operations optimization liaison teams and enterprise information services training teams. She is also tasked with supporting CS-Link and digital innovation projects and optimizing initiatives across the organization for nursing and clinical care support teams. Ms. Stephenson brings more than 20 years of nursing experience across a range of clinical settings including acute care, emergency medicine and home hospice, and has held roles as quality outcomes coordinator and medical/surgical nurse manager. She has worked in nursing informatics leadership since 2011, including at Rochester, Minn.-based Mayo Clinic and Houston Methodist, where she previously served as CNIO. Ms. Stephenson is actively involved in the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society nursing informatics committee and serves on the planning committee for the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society nursing informatics forum.

Lisa S. Stump. CDIO at Mount Sinai Health System (New York City). Ms. Stump serves as CDIO for the Mount Sinai Health System and dean for IT at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, where she provides executive leadership over the organization’s enterprise digital and data ecosystem. In this dual role, she is responsible for core IT and digital functions, cybersecurity and risk management, data privacy and governance, analytics, application portfolio management, digital experience, data democratization, and the advancement of AI and machine learning capabilities. A member of Mount Sinai’s executive leadership team, Mrs. Stump plays a central role in shaping and executing the health system’s five-year digital and technology strategy, ensuring technology investments drive innovation, performance and long-term growth across clinical care, research and education. She focuses on leveraging emerging technologies, modern operating models and data-driven insights to create measurable value and elevate patient, clinician and learner experiences. Prior to joining Mount Sinai, Mrs. Stump served as senior vice president and chief information and digital transformation officer at Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health and Yale Medicine, where she led large-scale digital transformation initiatives across a complex academic health system.

Maritza Suarez, MD. CMIO at University of Miami Health System. Dr. Suarez has served as CMIO at the University of Miami Health System since 2018, bringing a rare interdisciplinary foundation in biomedical engineering, physics and internal medicine to her leadership of health IT strategy and clinical innovation. She was recruited as faculty at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine in 2007 as a primary care physician, with an early career focused on both clinical practice and medical education, seeing patients daily at the general medicine faculty practice and supervising internal medicine residents in inpatient and outpatient settings. Dr. Suarez continues her outpatient medical practice alongside her CMIO responsibilities, ensuring that her approach to innovative technologies remains grounded in the day-to-day realities of care delivery. Her work focuses on advancing technologies that support the delivery of medical care and drive improvements in clinical quality.

Lavonia Thomas, DNP, RN. Chief Nursing Informatics and Innovation Officer at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center (Houston). Dr. Thomas leads nursing informatics and innovation at UT MD Anderson Cancer Center, working at the intersection of clinical excellence, data strategy and transformative technology to equip care teams with smarter tools that drive better patient outcomes. She has successfully led the integration and scaling of virtual nursing across MD Anderson, with a deployment strategy anchored in workflow design, nurse acceptance and incremental trust-building rather than technological sophistication alone, beginning with admission and discharge workflows that carry significant administrative burden and pull bedside nurses away from direct care activities. Dr. Thomas has established innovation units and an innovations workgroup largely comprised of frontline nurses, and hosts innovation days where nurses can engage directly with what the future of care delivery could look like and provide input on how it should be shaped. She is also launching a work-sampling study to delineate pain points across nursing workflows.

Ashley Weber. Vice President of Information Systems Ancillary Services at Ochsner Health (New Orleans). Ms. Weber leads critical technological operations at Ochsner Health over her 18-year career there, overseeing a broad range of ancillary service applications including lab information systems, enterprise imaging across radiology, cardiology and gastroenterology, and all Epic procedural applications. Ms. Weber recently led the replacement of legacy laboratory systems with Epic Beaker and safely archived outdated EHRs, saving the organization more than $4 million while ensuring secure, fast access to vital patient data. She also directs AI within the radiology service line, giving clinical teams advanced tools for diagnosis and treatment, and oversees the 3D printing team that produces precise surgical planning models for complex cases. For 14 consecutive years, U.S. News & World Report has recognized Ochsner as the No. 1 hospital in Louisiana, and the organization received the 2026 USA TODAY “Top Workplaces” award for the sixth consecutive year. Ms. Weber began her career at Ochsner as an administrative fellow and progressed through clinical operations, Epic Academy leadership and enterprise imaging before assuming her current role.

Emily White. Vice President of Revenue Cycle at Sutter Health (Sacramento, Calif.). Ms. White provides strategic direction and oversight of shared services revenue cycle operations across Sutter Health’s hospitals and medical foundations, with a focus on pre-registration, pre-certification, pre-authorization, authorization, registration, financial clearance, pre-billing edit, eligibility and co-pay collections. Ms. White joined Sutter Health in February 2025 from Alameda Health System in Oakland, Calif., where she served as director of patient financial services. Before that, she served as an analytics principal for Optum and as director of revenue integrity for Dignity Health’s Northern California region in San Francisco.

Thomasina Wilkins. Chief Revenue Officer at Sinai Chicago. Ms. Wilkins oversees the strategic and day-to-day operations of clinical documentation integrity, health information management, patient access, revenue integrity and patient financial services across Sinai Chicago’s hospitals and physician clinics, evaluating and refining financial processes to improve charges, reimbursement and cash flow. Ms. Wilkins brings more than 20 years of experience as a cross-functional healthcare business operations expert, with extensive leadership across academic medical centers, urgent care centers and multi-physician specialty groups spanning clinical, financial and IT engagements. Over the course of her career, she has led multiple performance improvement and financial transformation projects, partnering with public and community hospital leadership to implement process changes that drive sustainable financial results and improved patient experience across key areas including revenue cycle enhancement, patient access, health information management and coding, denials management and compliance training. Ms. Wilkins is also an accomplished author, having written standard operating practices for healthcare institutions across 20 states and internationally. 

Danielle Wilson. Vice President of Transformation and Innovation at Virtua Health (Marlton, N.J.). Danielle Wilson drives enterprisewide strategies that modernize operations, improve care delivery and position Virtua Health for long-term success, overseeing transformation initiatives across clinical, operational, corporate and technology functions while directing teams responsible for portfolio management, technology strategy, finance, analytics, workflow redesign and process improvement. Ms. Wilson translates strategic priorities into clear roadmaps, governance structures and performance measures that keep teams focused and initiatives on track. She uses data and measurable outcomes to guide decision-making and promote a culture of continuous improvement where ideas can be tested, refined and scaled when proven effective. Before assuming her current role, Ms. Wilson served as assistant vice president of the digital transformation office, director of applied analytics and director of the project management office at Marlton, N.J.-based Virtua Health, building progressive depth across the organization’s technology and innovation functions. She also serves as an Epic telehealth advisory board member, contributing to broader industry dialogue on virtual care strategy.

Kathy Young. Interim Chief Technology Officer and Vice President of Infrastructure and Operations at Hackensack Meridian Health (Edison, N.J.). Ms. Young provides strategic technology leadership and enterprise architecture oversight across Hackensack Meridian Health’s 18 hospitals and more than 500 patient care locations, leading a team of more than 200 engineers, technicians, project managers and support personnel with a focus on infrastructure, operations and digital transformation. Among her most significant achievements, Ms. Young directed the healthcare industry-leading transition to ChromeOS, which improved security, reduced costs, streamlined support and created a consistent end-user experience for clinicians and the hybrid workforce. She is currently overseeing the data center migration to Google Cloud Platform, the standardization of unified communications platforms, and the modernization of infrastructure through technical debt elimination. A consultant for more than 20 years prior to joining the system, she supported major health systems including Oakland, Calif.-based Kaiser Permanente and the Dubai Health Authority in EHR implementation and C-suite advisory. Hackensack University Medical Center ranked No. 1 in the New York Metro area and No. 1 in New Jersey in 2025 U.S. News & World Report rankings and earned multiple Joint Commission certifications, including the first sustainable health certification in the U.S.

Denise Zabawski. CIO at Nationwide Children’s Hospital (Columbus, Ohio). Ms. Zabawski has led all digital aspects of Nationwide Children’s Hospital since 2013, managing a department of more than 600 with a budget of more than $130 million. She has also overseen the organization’s growth from 4,000 to 18,000 employees and to a $6 billion annual budget. Ms. Zabawski led the technology behind the hospital’s social determinants of health screening, enabling care teams to better understand real-life factors affecting child health and act on those insights; deployed online scheduling and smart waitlist tools that cut wait times by up to 30 days in some areas; and implemented “Save My Place in Urgent Care” to smooth patient flow. Under her leadership, Nationwide Children’s built the digital backbone for the Institute for Genomic Medicine, enabling breakthroughs in precision medicine, and earned a $1 million grant to expand a virtual reality provider safety training program. Nationwide Children’s has been ranked in the top 10 nationally by U.S. News & World Report “Best Children’s Hospitals” for 12 consecutive years and is nationally ranked in all 11 pediatric specialties.


Companies

Meredith Agen. Chief Technology Officer at Imagine Pediatrics (Nashville, Tenn.). Ms. Agen oversees the technology strategy, data infrastructure and proprietary technology platform that powers Imagine Pediatrics’ virtual and in-home care model for children and youth with special health care needs across seven states and Washington, D.C. The platform Ms. Agen oversees drives more than 300,000 virtual and in-home patient encounters and has helped children avoid more than 5,000 preventable hospital visits, while generating more than $65 million in health plan savings. She leads population selection algorithms, clinical decision support tools and real-time data systems that drive care teams to next-best actions for each patient. Before Imagine Pediatrics, Ms. Agen served as senior director of data transformation at Cityblock Health and held data leadership roles at Comagine Health and UnitedHealth Group. Imagine Pediatrics received the 2026 “Pinnacle Award for Excellence in Pediatric Care” from Pinnacle Awards and the HLTH Kid’s “Health Best In Class Award” for 2025. 

Sarah Ahmad. CEO at CAQH (Washington, D.C.). Ms. Ahmad assumed the role of CEO at CAQH in 2023. With the most comprehensive provider and member data in the US, the company focuses on aligning the healthcare ecosystem around essential solutions, creating a more connected and less costly experience for all. Ms. Ahmad joined CAQH after holding leadership positions at Humana, Highmark Health, Magellan Health and, most recently, Shoppers Drug Mart, Canada’s largest pharmacy, health and wellness retailer. In addition to her background and expertise, Ms. Ahmad has a deep and personal commitment to removing barriers to the delivery of care. At every step of her career, she has worked to enable a better experience for providers and patients. Over the past 25-plus years, Ms. Ahmad has led teams responsible for key enterprisewide functions, including provider network development, product innovation, digital health solutions, strategic partnerships and acquisitions, advanced data analytics and patient care delivery.

Jodi Amendola. Executive Vice President at Supreme Group (Dallas). Ms. Amendola founded Amendola Communications in 2003 and built it into a nationally recognized, award-winning public relations and marketing agency serving healthcare, health tech and life sciences clients with nearly 90% repeat clients. She then sold the firm to Supreme Group in late 2024. In December 2025, Supreme Group unified Amendola Communications and Health+Commerce to launch Supreme Communications, the industry’s first AI-native, fully integrated communications agency dedicated exclusively to healthcare and life sciences. Ms. Amendola’s brand, team and culture were foundational to that launch. In 2025, a “Gold Hermes Creative Award” recognized Amendola’s thought leadership program for a client that secured 165 strategic media placements with a potential reach of 866.68 million across widely known publications, as well as a campaign for another client that generated 150-plus targeted media placements, 11 podcast appearances, 30-plus content assets, three award wins and 1,086 net new LinkedIn followers in nine months. She is a Forbes Agency Council contributor, serves on the Chilmark Research board and is a member of Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation. The Swaay.Health Health Awards recognized the acquisition campaign as “Press Event of the Year” in 2025.

Heather Bassett, MD. Chief Medical Officer at Xsolis (Franklin, Tenn.). Dr. Bassett has served as chief medical officer of Xsolis since January 2013, pioneering the company’s “Care Level Score” alongside the data science team, a proprietary measure combining clinical expertise and machine learning to provide a numerical representation of appropriate care status for each patient. Under her leadership, Xsolis has grown from a handful of employees to approximately 250, now serving more than 600 hospitals and health systems and 24 health plans nationwide. The company’s physician advisor services program has earned “No. 1 Best in KLAS” recognition for five consecutive years, most recently in 2026, and more than two-thirds of provider clients are now connected with one or more payer partners on Xsolis’s shared AI platform. Dr. Bassett received a gold Stevie Award as “Most Innovative Woman of the Year – Healthcare” in 2025, has published in numerous scientific and trade journals, and serves as an active voice on AI governance through her work with the Coalition for Health AI and NCQA’s working group on AI in healthcare. She also personally established an initiative resulting in women making up 54% of Xsolis’s workforce, more than 50% of leadership roles and 35% of technical roles.

Jodi Beichner. Vice President of Product Development for Diversified Solutions at enGen (Pittsburgh, Pa.). Ms. Beichner, as vice president of product development for diversified solutions at enGen, shapes the technological landscape for Highmark Health’s United Concordia Dental, which is the nation’s seventh-largest dental carrier serving 11.8 million members, and HM Insurance Group, a $1.2 billion national stop loss organization. She leads complex platform modernization efforts that enhance growth, operational efficiency and member experience. A standout accomplishment is Ms. Beichner’s leadership of a landmark $10 million technical debt elimination initiative for United Concordia Dental in 2025, one of the most substantial modernization efforts in the organization’s history, anticipated to expand with additional investments this year. She also serves as general manager of the Modulus program, a strategic partnership with IBM aimed at transforming legacy medical platforms into modern, modular architectures leveraging cloud and AI to significantly reduce onboarding time and costs. Since joining Highmark Health in 2013, Ms. Beichner has pioneered first-of-their-kind technology advancements, including helping HM Insurance Group become the first Highmark Health business unit to implement automated deployment processes in production and to utilize auto-scaling capabilities.

Morgan Beschle. Vice President of Kyruus Product at RevSpring (Nashville, Tenn.). Ms. Beschle leads the Kyruus product lines within RevSpring following their acquisition, overseeing more than 20 product offerings across a globally distributed team of 27 that supports more than 740 health systems, 2,400 ambulatory care organizations and 110 health plan brands in patient access and financial engagement. As part of Kyruus prior to the acquisition, Ms. Beschle contributed to $24 million across products under her responsibility and drove a 20-point increase in customer net promoter score, from 44 to 64. Her work centers on bringing previously separate capabilities into a more cohesive product experience, including development of RevSpring’s model context protocol suite with a national directory grounding layer designed to bridge advanced AI models with provider quality data, real-time availability, insurance networks and cost transparency to enable trustworthy care navigation at scale. She is a registered inventor on the “RxEffect” technology patent and has prior involvement with Women in Product and the Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation. RevSpring earned “Best in KLAS for Patient Financial Engagement” in 2025 and 2026.

Preeti Bhargava. Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Arintra (San Francisco). Ms. Bhargava leads customer success, implementation, product and technology teams for Arintra, the leading GenAI-native autonomous medical coding platform. She is tasked with setting and executing the company’s technology and product roadmap. She holds two patents and more than 35 peer-reviewed publications, and built her career on complex data problems at Oracle, Xerox PARC, Samsung Research America, Klout/Lithium and Demandbase. Ms. Bhargava co-founded Arintra after a routine emergency department visit left her with a billing statement full of errors. She then traveled across the country shadowing coders and learning medical coding herself before designing a solution, an approach that has produced a 100% implementation success rate with zero customer turnover. Arintra’s platform codes charts autonomously across 15 specialties with no workflow changes for physicians. Ms. Bhargava is a recipient of the Palantir scholarship for women in technology and the Grace Hopper “Celebration of Women in Computing” scholarship.

Michelle Blackmer. Chief Marketing Officer at Rhapsody (Boston). Ms. Blackmer leads global go-to-market strategy at Rhapsody, a health data interoperability company that has earned “Best in KLAS for Integration Solutions” for 17 consecutive years. With more than 25 years of experience in healthcare data management, Ms. Blackmer oversees brand, product, demand generation and customer advocacy, translating complex interoperability and AI concepts into narratives that resonate with executive and technical audiences. She has been instrumental in repositioning Rhapsody around “agent-ready interoperability,” helping health systems, payers and digital health innovators understand that AI’s success in healthcare depends on data quality, integration and governance rather than just AI models alone. At Rhapsody, Ms. Blackmer has strengthened the company’s ecosystem engagement with organizations leveraging Epic and other core platforms, driving the adoption of interoperability solutions that reduce friction in prior authorization, care coordination and clinical data exchange. Prior to Rhapsody, she held senior leadership roles at Verato, Informatica, IBM and CareEvolution, including a role launching one of the first Watson-based predictive analytics solutions and contributing to the evolution of healthcare identity management following IBM’s acquisition of Initiate Systems. Rhapsody was also recognized on Newsweek‘s “World’s Best Digital Health Companies” list in 2024.

Stephanie Brown. President and Executive Director at CRISP DC (Washington, D.C.). Ms. Brown leads CRISP DC, the District of Columbia’s designated health information exchange, which she guided through a pivotal organizational transformation that secured its official designation as the District’s health information exchange, while simultaneously establishing CRISP DC as a standalone nonprofit corporation. Under Ms. Brown’s leadership, the organization has earned national recognition for its work advancing interoperability, public health innovation and whole-person health across the District. She has expanded CRISP DC’s scope beyond traditional clinical data exchange to include substance use disorder data sharing, absenteeism data integration and other public health-focused initiatives that have strengthened cross-sector collaboration among healthcare providers, behavioral health organizations, education systems and government agencies. Ms. Brown oversees large-scale grants and contracts and multimillion-dollar budgets while leading a multidisciplinary team spanning technical operations, project management and technical assistance. She was named to the Washington Business Journal‘s “40 Under 40” list and previously served as program director and program manager at CRISP DC, as well as senior application analyst at the University of Pennsylvania.

Robin Carver. Senior Vice President of Commercialization at Prenosis (Chicago, Ill.). Ms. Carver leads the full commercial vertical at Prenosis, spanning product management, marketing, sales, public relations, operations and customer experience. The company is developing the only FDA-authorized AI diagnostic for sepsis, called Sepsis ImmunoScore. A registered nurse who spent nearly 14 years at Raleigh, N.C.-based WakeMed Health & Hospitals, rising from staff nurse to director of infection prevention, Ms. Carver achieved an 87% reduction in central line bloodstream infections, eliminated ventilator-associated pneumonia in the medical ICU and sustained hand hygiene compliance at 90%, with research published in the American Journal of Infection Control. At Premier, she led product launch, commercialization and partnerships for safety surveillance and quality solutions, exceeding sales goals by 25% and growing revenue by 200% over nearly 11 years. Prenosis was named a TIME “Best Invention” in 2024 and a Fast Company “World Changing Ideas” honoree in 2025. Ms. Carver also serves as a nursing mentor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and as vice president of the CNO affinity group lead at Premier.

Betsy Castillo. Vice President of Clinical Data Abstraction at Carta Healthcare (San Francisco). Ms. Castillo oversees more than 280 abstractors, managers and clinical leaders at Carta Healthcare, building and sustaining a national clinical data abstraction function that maintains 98-99% inter-rater reliability through a comprehensive quality framework and continuous education program. With more than 35 years of nursing experience and over 15 years in clinical data abstraction, Ms. Castillo has been a leading voice in emphasizing that “good AI is not good enough” in healthcare without clinical grounding, and under her leadership Carta Healthcare’s approach ensures AI accelerates abstraction while clinicians validate and guide outputs. Health systems working with Carta Healthcare have reduced abstraction time by up to 66% and lowered costs by 50% or more, while gaining access to timely, reliable data that supports quality improvement initiatives and resource allocation. Ms. Castillo also leads and mentors her nationwide team, helping many clinicians who have transitioned from traditional bedside roles into data-focused careers. Carta Healthcare earned gold recognition for “Best Use of AI in Healthcare” at the 2025 Merit Awards and the 2026 “AI Excellence Award.”

Michelle Castillon. Chief Product Transformation Officer at Vee Healthtek (Plano, Texas). Ms. Castillon owns enterprisewide product strategy at Vee Healthtek, including the creation of “RevAmp,” the company’s AI-driven revenue cycle ecosystem, which she led from strategy through deployment and adoption. This work delivered a 26% reduction in preventable eligibility denials, 133% faster verification timelines and 50% decrease in resolution time for clients. Ms. Castillon is also responsible for data science, enterprise analytics and the product department, and her leadership is directly attributed to the company’s projected 25% revenue growth. She has spent more than a decade in revenue cycle leadership at Conifer Health Solutions, where she held roles from director of business process Innovation through vice president of product line management before joining Vee Healthtek. Her thought leadership, including a widely distributed “Prior Authorization Automation” playbook, has guided CFOs across health systems in improving efficiency and increasing revenue capture. 

Joey Cavanaugh, RN. COO at Zotec Partners (Carmel, Ind.). Ms. Cavanaugh has worked in the healthcare industry since 1987 and joined Zotec Partners in 2005, building nearly two decades of operations leadership at one of the country’s largest privately held, technology-enabled revenue cycle management companies. Ms. Cavanaugh provides direction and oversight for all operational areas of the company and its clients, with specializations in radiology, anesthesiology, emergency medicine and multi-specialty billing. She brings a particular focus to client communications, strategic planning and coaching, and developing team members. Her combination of clinical background as a registered nurse and deep revenue cycle expertise gives her a distinctive perspective on delivering efficient and effective solutions to healthcare providers. Ms. Cavanaugh has continuously embraced greater responsibility throughout her tenure at Zotec.

Stacey Caywood. CEO and Chair of the Executive Board at Wolters Kluwer (Netherlands). Ms. Caywood has served as CEO and chair of the executive board of Wolters Kluwer since February 2026, capping a career of progressive leadership within the company that has spanned legal, compliance and healthcare markets across Europe and the U.S. Ms. Caywood served as CEO of Wolters Kluwer Health from 2020 to 2025, leading the evolution of the company’s healthcare solutions and ensuring medical and nursing professionals around the world could benefit from advanced clinical technology and evidence-based data and insights. Before that, she served as CEO of Wolters Kluwer’s legal and regulatory division, where she led a strategic transformation across Europe and the U.S. that returned the business to organic growth, and as president and CEO of Wolters Kluwer’s law and business division. Her expertise spans business transformation, digital revenue growth, strategy execution, portfolio management, mergers and acquisitions, product innovation and commercial excellence. In 2021, Ms. Caywood received a “Female Executive of the Year” Stevie Award in the business products category in recognition of her leadership.

Katie Chaffee. Chief Client Officer at NextGen Healthcare (Fredericksburg, Va.). Ms. Chaffee leads a team of more than 600 professionals across client management, professional services and managed services at NextGen Healthcare, responsible for the end-to-end client experience for a large portfolio of healthcare organizations. Since joining NextGen in 2022, Ms. Chaffee has driven a 40-point increase in Net Promoter Scores, improved renewal rates, reduced implementation timelines by half, reduced issue resolution times by 50% and transformed professional services from double-digit negative margins to sustained profitability via a deliberate shift to proactive client engagement, standardized delivery methodology and AI-enabled support capabilities. Client outcomes include reducing administrative burden by up to two hours per day, increasing patient throughput and increasing monthly charges by 43%. She serves on the Xavier University Health Services Administration advisory board and as a JOCO United board member. NextGen earned Black Book Research’s top project management solution recognition for nine consecutive years and was named to Newsweek‘s “Most Trustworthy Companies in America” in 2025.

Julia Chou. COO at Abridge (San Francisco). Ms. Chou has been the operational engine behind Abridge since joining as the company’s first business hire in 2019, building the generative AI platform company’s business functions from the ground up and scaling headcount by five in 2024 alone. Ms. Chou led deals with some of the largest health systems in the nation in 2024, quadrupled company headcount, opened offices in San Francisco and New York City, and helped secure a $250 million Series D funding round. She has also played a central role in shaping Abridge’s culture, building an environment centered on deep collaboration and a shared commitment to AI’s potential in healthcare. Beyond growth metrics, Ms. Chou has prioritized employee wellbeing by expanding the company’s parental benefits policy to include comprehensive family planning and fertility coverage, building on an existing policy that already provided four months of parental leave for either parent. She was recognized as one of the “Top 50 Women Leaders in Healthcare Technology” by The Healthcare Technology Report in 2024.

Suzanne Cogan. President and Chief Customer Officer at WebPT (Phoenix, Ariz.). Ms. Cogan leads all teams responsible for the client experience at WebPT’s growing network of rehab therapy clinics, beginning with initial partnership exploration and spanning through sales, implementation, client success and support. Since she stepped into the role, WebPT has reported customer satisfaction scores above 90%, a Net Promoter Score increase of more than 40 points in the past year, and improvements in sales growth, retention, support response and resolution times. WebPT was recognized with a gold Best in Biz Award for “Support Department of the Year” in 2025. Prior to WebPT, as COO at Aspirion, Ms. Cogan scaled operations to support business growth of 78% while improving employee retention by more than 100%. Prior, at SPH Analytics, revenue grew by 3x under her leadership and client retention climbed well above 90%. She was part of the leadership team through SPH Analytic’s sale to Press Ganey, then led a $135 million payer business unit following the acquisition. WebPT was named the market leader for outpatient rehab therapy in the “Best in KLAS” report for 2024.

Cathryn Connolley. CEO and Founder at Doctivity Health (Bloomsburg, Pa.). Ms. Connolley launched Doctivity Health in May 2022, stood the company up in just two months, and within three years secured three rounds of seed funding totaling $5 million from two health tech venture capital groups. She has also built a national client roster that includes Danville, Pa.-based Geisinger, Hershey, Pa.-based Penn State Health, Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health and Children’s Healthcare of Atlanta. Under her leadership, Doctivity has driven $195 million in new revenue and return on investment for customers to date, and she negotiated an exclusive strategic partnership with LexisNexis Risk Solutions, working directly with its CEO within 24 months of Doctivity’s launch. In a rare disease program, Ms. Connolley’s work helped 12 of 15 underperforming providers reach productivity targets within 12 months, cutting ramp-up time by 50%; a specialty group reduced referral outmigration from 70% to 30%, increased new patient referrals by 55% and generated more than $2 million in new revenue within six months. An adjunct instructor at Marywood University and president’s strategic counsel member at Elizabethtown College, she previously spent 14 years at Geisinger, ultimately as vice president of system business development, marketing strategy and operations. 

Beth Cooper. Vice President of Marketing and Sales and Head of AI at KNB Communications (Stamford, Conn.). Ms. Cooper leads marketing and sales as well as AI strategy at KNB Communications, a top 10 award-winning public relations and marketing agency serving healthcare, health tech and life sciences clients, with a recognized specialization in generative AI content marketing, generative engine optimization and answer engine optimization. A former marketing leader at Sony Electronics and a University of Maryland professor of marketing, Ms. Cooper redirected her career to healthcare after her son’s diagnosis with fully methylated Fragile X syndrome, driven by a conviction that even the most groundbreaking healthcare advances fall short if they cannot be communicated clearly and accessed by those who need them. Her AI-driven campaign work earned a gold “MUSE Award,” and she was named “Marketing Person of the Year” by the Health IT Marketing Community. She was also named one of Silicon Valley Business Journal’s “Women of Influence” in 2018. She has built a cross-channel following exceeding 100,000, sharing insights on emerging trends and the evolving role of AI in business.

Shanna DeLeo. Chief Technology Officer for Sunrise at Altera Digital Health (Niagara Falls, N.Y.). Ms. DeLeo owns end-to-end strategy, product vision, delivery and operational outcomes for Altera Digital Health’s Sunrise business unit, providing full profit and loss accountability for a global organization of 640-plus employees. In 2025, she led her team to deliver “Sunrise 25.1,” the organization’s first major EHR release in three years, on time and of high quality, with 700-plus new features that reestablished the company’s credibility with customers and renewed engagement with Gartner and KLAS. Ms. DeLeo also brought three new products to market in 2025, met complex regulatory commitments and navigated post-acquisition technical integration. Recognized with the 2025 “Operational Excellence Award” from Harris, Altera Digital Health’s parent company, she became one of only two CTOs at Harris and the only woman in that role. She actively ensures women leaders have equal voice and influence in a research and development environment, mentors women at multiple career stages and regularly represents research and development at healthcare leadership events, often as the only woman on stage.

Amee Devani. CEO and Co-Founder at WellBeam (Palo Alto, Calif.). Ms. Devani co-founded WellBeam to address the fragmentation of care coordination between physicians and post-acute providers, building a platform embedded directly in Epic that digitizes order management workflows and enables real-time communication. Early adopters report breakeven within four months through automated billing capture, an 85% reduction in home health order turnaround times, and a 70% decrease in administrative workload. WellBeam is deployed with Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health’s Atrium Health Medical Group, Compassus and multiple large, multi-state health systems across California and the Pacific Northwest. In November 2025, WellBeam closed a $10 million Series A round. Before WellBeam, Ms. Devani served in the office of the CEO at Palantir Technologies and led industry prioritization and investments at Msingi, an East Africa-focused investment fund. WellBeam has been named a 2024 UCSF Health Digital Awards “Rising Star – New EHR Innovation.”

Tara Dragert. COO of Surescripts and President of Surescripts Health Information Network (Arlington, Va.). Ms. Dragert joined Surescripts in 2010, starting as a senior business analyst, transitioned to various product manager roles, and finally climbed the ranks to become chief product officer. In her current role as COO, she oversees product innovation, network technology and operations, security and AI, ensuring Surescripts’ product, technology and execution work together to deliver reliable, scalable solutions for the healthcare ecosystem. As COO, she is deeply focused on aligning teams, platforms and processes to support long-term growth, resilience and customer value. With her dual role as COO of Surescripts and president of Surescripts Health Information Network, a designated Qualified Health Information Network under Trusted Exchange Framework and Common Agreement, she is one of the few people on any healthcare stage who can speak about interoperability not as an aspiration but as a trusted network that operates as the backbone of U.S. healthcare data exchange, which she has helped build. She has had a hand in the 30.5 billion exchanges of health intelligence that Surescripts supported in 2025, a 12.3% increase from 2024, that connects 2.32 million healthcare professionals and provider organizations, and virtually every insured American.

Rachel Dunscombe. CEO at HL7 International (Ann Arbor, Mich.). Ms. Dunscombe leads HL7 International’s global strategy to advance healthcare interoperability and data standards adoption across more than 40 countries, overseeing the continued development and global adoption of HL7 standards and working to shift the industry from standards development alone to implementation at scale. Prior to HL7, she served as CEO of openEHR International, leading global adoption of open health data standards and expanding its international footprint, and as CEO of the NHS Digital Academy, developing digital leadership capabilities across England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. She also advised the UK Secretary of State for Health and served on the UK Government AI Council, contributing to national strategy at the intersection of healthcare and AI. At HL7, Ms. Dunscombe is helping to expand engagement across industry, academia and government, as well as elevate the organization’s global voice as healthcare shifts toward enterprise-scale AI implementation. She holds a visiting professorship at Imperial College London.

Tamra Durfee. Senior Virtual CISO at Fortified Health Security (Brentwood, Tenn.). Ms. Durfee, a senior virtual CISO at Fortified Health Security with more than 27 years of experience, works alongside hospitals and health systems to protect operations from cyber threats. In her role, she recognizes that every outage, delay or data breach has real consequences for patients. In response, she helps build practical, risk-based strategies covering vulnerable medical devices, third-party defenses and ransomware preparedness. Ms. Durfee has spoken at ViVE, the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, InfoSec Nashville, the ISC2 Security Congress, the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives and more. She has also contributed insights to Healthcare IT News, Chief Healthcare Executive and Fortified’s “Horizon Reports.” She is a founding member of Women in CyberSecurity, an active member of Bluebird Leaders and a dedicated mentor to emerging professionals in the field. Fortified Health Security has earned “Best in KLAS” for security and managed services from 2022 through 2025, recognition as a “Best Cybersecurity Transparent Leader” by Censinet and KLAS for 2023 and 2024, and a Frost & Sullivan “Customer Value Leadership Award” in healthcare cybersecurity in 2024.

Edith Edwards. Chief Analytics Officer at Buzz Health (Fort Walton Beach, Fla.). Ms. Edwards leads pricing, network and client reporting functions at Buzz Health, translating complex aggregate prescription data into actionable intelligence for pharmacy and healthcare clients, including analysis of prescription savings activity, refill trends, claim outcomes, reversal patterns and regional demand indicators. Ms. Edwards brings more than 28 years of data-driven analytics experience from Fortune 500 companies across tourism, financial services, retail and logistics. Prior, at a major cruise line, she shifted to behavioral segmentation-based marketing, increasing incremental revenue by $48 million and improving booking rates by 27%. At a leading retailer, she developed targeting models that saved $28 million annually. At Buzz Health, she spearheaded the development of the company’s enterprise client reporting package, providing daily interactive access to transactional data and key performance metrics so pharmacy clients can more quickly identify where their programs are reaching patients effectively and where affordability gaps remain. She also serves on the Buzz Health board of directors, combining strategic oversight with operational leadership, and represents Buzz Health’s commitment to closing affordability and coverage gaps for underinsured populations. 

Kathy English. Chief Marketing Officer at Vital (Claymont, Del.). Ms. English leads all marketing efforts at Vital, drawing on more than 25 years in healthcare and technology as well as a clinical background as a critical care nurse. In her role, she helps position AI-powered patient communication and experience solutions. In quarter one of 2026, Ms. English helped launch the “AI Care Standard,” a groundbreaking initiative establishing the first-ever operational standard focused exclusively on AI that communicates directly with patients, convening a coalition of respected health systems, patient-safety leaders, and clinical and technology innovators. The campaign resulted in coverage in Newsweek and Patient Safety & Quality Healthcare. Prior, she played a critical role in positioning Vocera for its acquisition by Stryker Corporation during her tenure as chief marketing officer, and led the CEO Coalition in 2021 to reshape safety in healthcare with a focus on psychological wellbeing, equity and zero harm. She received the Medical Marketing+Media “Hall of Femme” recognition in 2021, while Vital was named a winner in the 2026 “Pinnacle Awards” for AI innovation.

Whitney Eubanks. Vice President of Product Management for Integrated Care at PointClickCare (Toronto). Ms. Eubanks leads product strategy and execution across PointClickCare’s post-acute, acute care and payer ecosystems, overseeing the intelligence layer and workflows that connect skilled nursing facilities, pharmacies, practitioners, hospitals and payers. Ms. Eubanks spearheaded the launch of “Discharge Intel” at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society 2026 event, providing “in-the-moment” insights that enable care teams to reduce avoidable costs and improve patient outcomes at the critical discharge transition. Under her strategic direction, “ED Optimization,” powered by the “Reason for Transfer” AI model, gives frontline emergency department staff instant visibility into why patients were transferred from skilled nursing facilities, along with comprehensive clinical data and current medication lists, improving triage decisions and reducing duplicative testing. She also led the Massachusetts behavioral health treatment and referral platform co-development and orchestrated the complex post-acquisition technology consolidation between PointClickCare and Audacious Inquiry, migrating eight state markets and upgrading experiences for more than 1,000 customers. PointClickCare was named “Best in KLAS” in skilled nursing facilities/long-term care for the seventh consecutive year in 2026.

Helen Figge, PharmD. Chief Strategy Officer at Medicasoft (Arlington, Va.). MedicaSoft named Dr. Figge chief strategy officer in 2018. She also serves in senior advisory roles to organizations across the U.S. and sits on committees and boards for Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society, National Association of Health Data Organizations and other organizations. She also is the executive in residence for Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences University and first woman elected president of the HIMSS New York State Chapter. Prior to joining MedicaSoft, Dr. Figge worked for AmerisourceBergen, Allscripts and Alere; she also supported and guided several health IT start-up companies. Dr. Figge is well published, including several book chapters on various healthcare and IT-related topics.

Stacy Fox. Chief Growth Officer at The Garage (Orlando, Fla.). Ms. Fox leads the full commercial strategy across sales, marketing, product marketing, partnerships and account management at The Garage, a population health platform designed to empower value-based care across communities, translating health system, payer and risk-bearing entity data into real-time, encounter-driven insights that directly impact financial performance and patient outcomes. Ms. Fox has repeatedly demonstrated the ability to scale organizations at different stages of growth: she led teams to 469% year-over-year revenue growth in a competitive digital health SaaS environment, scaled annual recurring revenue from approximately $1 million to $22 million, reduced sales cycles from 180 days to 120 days; and expanded average deal size from $60,000 to $180,000 through pricing and packaging innovation. She also supported a $50 million Series C fundraising effort by clearly articulating product-market fit. An active thought leader with more than 7,000 professional platform followers, she simplifies complex topics including AI in healthcare, interoperability and value-based care into actionable insights for healthcare executives.

Sally Ann Frank. Global Lead of Health and Life Sciences at Microsoft for Startups (Redmond, Wash.). Ms. Frank partners with founders, investors, health systems, payers and life sciences organizations to identify where cloud and AI can unlock measurable outcomes, helping high-potential healthcare and life sciences startups translate promising technology into secure, scalable and compliant solutions. Ms. Frank creates alignment between innovators and healthcare stakeholders, including orchestrating introductions, structuring early collaborations and enabling customer discovery, which helps startups validate outcomes and reduce the friction that slows adoption in regulated environments. She is the author of “The Startup Protocol: A Guide for Digital Health Startups to Bypass Pitfalls and Adopt Strategies That Work” and “The Unicorn Protocol: Digital Health Unicorns, How They Got There and What You Can Learn from Them”, sharing repeatable best practices for go-to-market strategy, evidence generation and responsible AI adoption in healthcare. She serves on the boards of CareCo and Heart-Tech Health and as an advisory board member of the Galien Foundation.

Tejal Gandhi, MD. Chief Safety and Transformation Officer at Press Ganey (South Bend, Ind.). Dr. Gandhi leads development of AI-powered innovations that unite disparate data sources to identify safety risks before they materialize, including implementation of rigorous principles of reliability, explainability and accountability for all Press Ganey AI systems. In 2010, she served as principal investigator and co-author of a landmark New England Journal of Medicine study demonstrating that barcode-enabled Electronic medication administration record systems significantly reduce medication errors and adverse drug events. The technology is now used in nearly every hospital around the world. As president and CEO of the National Patient Safety Foundation, she co-authored the “Free from Harm” report establishing a comprehensive national strategy for total system safety, and developed the patient safety structural measure in 2024, which has been adopted nationally by CMS as a quality measure assessing how well hospitals have strengthened patient safety strategies. She leads the annual “State of Healthcare Safety” report, drawing on data from 1.3 million-plus healthcare employees and 23 million-plus patient encounters, and in 2026 spearheaded the “Zero Harm 24/7” initiative.

Julia Garcia. Head of Operations at Pear Suite (Honolulu). Ms. Garcia leads the largest managed networks of community health workers in the country at Pear Suite, supporting more than 2,500 workers that serve over 100,000 community members monthly across multiple states. Ms. Garcia operationalized the embedding of an unstructured, unregulated workforce within the compliance frameworks, reimbursement infrastructure and quality systems required by Medicaid, Medicare and value-based care, allowing community health workers to document outcomes, meet regulatory standards and sustain their work financially. She began her career as a community health worker conducting Spanish-language outreach for Latino families in rural Texas, and that lived experience now informs how she builds systems at scale, ensuring operational frameworks remain grounded in trust. Among her measurable outcomes, she led a promotora-led colorectal cancer screening campaign that connected more than 500 Latino patients to preventive care. She manages more than 50 health plan relationships, was appointed by Washington State’s Secretary of Health to the maternal mortality review panel, and Pear Suite received the HLTH Foundation “Techquity for Health Award” in 2026.

Jenny Gonsalves. Chief Product and Technology Officer at Lyra Health (Burlingame, Calif.). Ms. Gonsalves has spent nearly a decade at Lyra Health, working to prove that scaling AI in mental health doesn’t require trading off reach for responsibility. In her role, she oversees technology and innovation across data, design, engineering, IT, product and security. In 2016, Ms. Gonsalves helped launch one of the first AI-powered clinical matching systems for mental health, and today 97% of Lyra members stay with their first therapist match while nine in 10 report meaningful clinical improvement. Peer-reviewed research in Value in Health found that Lyra’s AI-powered model reduced treatment length by two sessions on average and lowered episode costs by nearly 20%, saving employers an average of $340 per member without compromising outcomes. In 2025, Ms. Gonsalves led the launch of “Lyra Empower,” an integrated AI platform that reduces provider administrative burden by up to 40%, equips employers with predictive workforce insights and accelerates access to effective care. She was honored twice on Girl Geek X’s “Female CTOs to Watch” list and recognized among the “Top 100 Women in HealthTech” by Storm3.

Tiffany Goralczyk. Director of Clinical Solutions at Elemeno Health (Oakland, Calif.). Ms. Goralczyk, a registered nurse and clinical nurse leader, leads a team at Elemeno Health that provides technology-enabled clinical education solutions aligned with health system priorities including workforce readiness, regulatory compliance and quality improvement, overseeing a portfolio of 40-plus client partnerships valued at more than $5 million. Through capacity planning, organizational redesign and resource optimization, Ms. Goralczyk contributed to increasing Elemeno’s gross margins from approximately 50% to more than 75%. She has also developed scalable education and content frameworks supporting the creation and maintenance of thousands of microlearning resources that have enabled health systems to standardize workflows, reduce variability in care delivery and accelerate clinician time-to-competency. Beyond inpatient settings, she has extended her impact across home health, hospice, clinical research, ambulatory and ancillary services. Ms. Goralczyk was recognized as a 2022 “40 Under 40 Emerging Nurse Leader” by the Illinois Nurses Foundation and American Nurses Association. Elemeno Health was named to Inc. 5000’s list of America’s fastest-growing companies in 2025.

Kem Graham. Vice President of Growth and Strategy at CliniComp (San Diego, Calif.). Ms. Graham leads CliniComp’s expansion from a historically government-focused healthcare technology provider into the commercial healthcare market, drawing on more than 25 years of experience in business development across healthcare, nonprofit and technology sectors. Ms. Graham has generated momentum for CliniComp’s system-as-a-service model, providing a comprehensive EHR solution suite with AI, hardware and support at a predictable fixed price, demonstrating a need in the market for a superior value alternative to traditional EHR approaches. She has been featured in Chief Healthcare Executive, MedCity News and the Healthcare IT podcast, and previously served as senior director of development for Sharp HealthCare Foundation, where she led multi-million-dollar campaigns and successfully closed multiple $1 million gifts. CliniComp received MedTech Breakthrough awards for “Best Electronic Health Record Service” in 2024 and “EHR Innovation Award” in 2025, and achieved Great Place to Work certification in September 2024 and 2023.

Cheryl Griffin. Vice President of Professional Services at Verato (McLean, Va.). Ms. Griffin, wielding more than 30 years of experience in health information management, enterprise master patient index strategy and healthcare IT modernization, leads the global services organization that delivers “Verato MDM Cloud” to healthcare, payer, life sciences and digital health customers. Ms. Griffin’s organization partners with executive, clinical, IT, analytics and digital leaders to unify fragmented identities across systems of record, engagement and insight, providing a 360-degree view of people, providers and locations in order to enable exceptional consumer experiences, fuel business growth and accelerate AI readiness. She has guided health systems through enterprise interoperability, mergers and acquisition integration, duplicate record remediation, provider data unification and digital transformation programs. Before Verato, she spent more than a decade as professional services leader at Initiate Systems, which has been acquired by IBM, and earlier served as health information management director at Daytona Beach, Fla.-based Halifax Health. Verato received Black Book Research’s “Top Health Information Management System Vendor” recognition in 2026.

Delphine Groll. Co-Founder and COO at Nabla (New York City). Ms. Groll leads operations, go-to-market strategy and organizational scale at Nabla, a clinical AI company now used by tens of thousands of clinicians across hundreds of healthcare organizations and supporting over 30 million patient encounters annually. The company boasts an average monthly recurring revenue growth of 20% and $120 million in total funding, including a $70 million Series C. Ms. Groll pioneered Nabla’s co-development model with health systems, ensuring continuous clinician feedback informs product design and deployment, and drove strategic partnerships including integrations with Epic, athenahealth and Cerner. At leading health systems, Nabla has contributed to up to a 50% reduction in documentation time and meaningful decreases in clinician burnout. She also helped establish governance frameworks contributing to the Coalition for Health AI. Ms. Groll was named to Inc.com’s “Female Founders 500” for 2026 and to Crain’s New York Business‘ “31 Notable Leaders in Healthcare Technology,” and serves as a board member and investor at The Galion Project.

Richa Gupta, MBBS. Vice President of Care Transformation at Ambience Healthcare (San Francisco). Dr. Gupta leads care transformation at Ambience Healthcare, partnering with senior health system leaders to apply AI to the most complex clinical and operational challenges facing health systems today. Ambience provides an intelligence layer on top of EHRs that captures physician-patient interactions, supports documentation, and ensures accurate coding and billing. Ultimately, this drives measurable improvements in documentation burden, coding accuracy and physician retention while reducing revenue leakage. In 2026, the platform is expanding across the full care continuum, including ambulatory, emergency and inpatient settings, surfacing real-time insights that enhance patient care. Dr. Gupta brings more than two decades of experience leading projects and teams at large academic medical centers to her role, most recently serving as medical group COO at Rush University System for Health in Chicago, where she worked for more than 13 years. Before Rush, she spent more than seven years at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago, most recently as director of surgical services.

Meghan Harris. President and COO at Acentra Health (McLean, Va.). Ms. Harris oversees all public and commercial operations, product and solution delivery, innovation and data and AI strategies at Acentra Health, one of the largest technology and healthcare solutions providers in the public sector. With a background in biostatistics, health analytics and mathematics, Ms. Harris is a leading proponent of using social determinants of health data to drive clinical interventions, spearheading initiatives that integrate these data points into Acentra Health’s workflows to enable state Medicaid programs to design proactive, targeted community health initiatives. Her most significant achievement has been the operational stabilization and growth of Acentra Health post-merger, successfully moving the organization toward a single standardized operating model that ensures consistent quality across all state and federal contracts and has driven consistent year-over-year revenue growth. In recognition of her strategic impact and operational excellence, Ms. Harris was recently appointed to the Acentra Health board of directors. 

Patty Hayward. General Manager of Healthcare and Life Sciences at Talkdesk (San Francisco). Ms. Hayward leads strategy and growth for Talkdesk’s healthcare, pharma and life sciences vertical, building Talkdesk’s fastest-growing vertical business by positioning the contact center and patient support hub as strategic assets that influence access, loyalty and financial performance. At Memorial Healthcare System in Hollywood, Fla., Ms. Hayward helped guide a transformation from a fragmented environment into a cloud-based contact center integrated with Epic, with the system reducing call abandonment from 15-20% to less than 2.5%, service levels nearly doubling, and AI now handling most primary care scheduling and MyChart password support calls. She also advocated for building direct EHR integration into the Talkdesk platform, making Talkdesk the first contact center organization invited to participate in the Epic Workshop co-development program. Before Talkdesk, Ms. Hayward held national vice president roles at McKesson and area vice president of sales at Aetna’s Medicity division. Talkdesk received the 2026 CMSWire “IMPACT Award” and has been recognized across multiple G2 and TrustRadius lists.

Teal Heath, RN. Founder and Principal at Equinox Healthcare IT (Colorado). Ms. Heath, a registered nurse and fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives, founded Equinox Healthcare IT to fill a gap in how technology is incorporated into healthcare construction, developing a comprehensive methodology that addresses the interconnected nature of clinical workflows, physical infrastructure and digital systems. Her team delivered technology integration for the Loma Linda University Health Dennis and Carol Troesh Medical Campus, a $1 billion project with a 16-story adult tower and a 9-story children’s tower, ensuring more than 400 hospital beds were fully connected to enterprise systems, clinical applications and medical devices at opening. Ms. Heath is currently supporting active initiatives at various hospitals, bringing more than 25 years of progressive healthcare and technology leadership experience, including vice president of enterprise project management office at Centennial, Colo.-based Centura Health, and contributes to industry dialogue through Colorado Association of Healthcare Engineers and Directors conference panels, International Federation of Healthcare Engineering publications and invited presentations.

Alana Isabel. Vice President of Product Management at Greenway Health (Tampa, Fla.). Ms. Isabel leads strategic innovation across AI-enabled automation, revenue cycle and patient experience at Greenway Health, playing a critical role in creating and launching “Novare,” Greenway’s agentic AI-native EHR and revenue cycle platform for ambulatory care. Ms. Isabel enabled rapid prototyping that brought a next-generation EHR experience to life for thousands of practices, and her leadership helped Greenway be named the most improved physician practice solution in 2026 by KLAS Research. The platform operates with agentic AI at its core across clinical, revenue cycle and patient engagement workflows, delivering ambient note-taking, intelligent coding suggestions, automated prior authorization and real-time benefit checks. Ms. Isabel previously held product leadership roles at Revecore and R1 RCM. She is also an active mentor for women in technology, helping shape the next generation of leaders in health IT.

Erica Jain. CEO and Co-Founder at Healthie (New York). Ms. Jain built Healthie from a class project into the infrastructure layer powering outpatient healthcare for 47,000 clinicians, with the platform crossing 20 million patient records in April 2026 and processing 2.5 billion application programming interface calls monthly. Ms. Jain designed Healthie as an EHR built for the providers delivering longitudinal, relationship-based care, including dietitians, therapists, nurses, physical therapists and doulas, all of whom had been underserved by technology designed for episodic, hospital-based care. At least eight of the 150 organizations accepted into CMS’s inaugural “ACCESS program Cohort 1” are Healthie customers, reflecting the infrastructure readiness she has built. Healthie has been profitable for the majority of its history, with $42 million raised to date, and in 2025 was named the “No. 1 Best Place to Work” in both New York City and Los Angeles by Built In. Ms. Jain was recognized by Rock Health as a “Top 50 in Digital Health” honoree and by Slice of Healthcare as a “Top Digital Health Leader.”

Shubhra Jain, MD. Chief Business Officer at Hippocratic AI (Palo Alto, Calif.). Dr. Jain leads commercial strategy and partnerships across providers, payers, life sciences and the startup ecosystem at Hippocratic AI, a safety-focused generative AI company building large language model solutions tuned specifically for the healthcare industry. Dr. Jain joined the company in June 2025, bringing a rare combination of clinical training, investment experience and product leadership to her role. Before Hippocratic AI, she led healthcare investing at Tarsadia Investments and Cota Capital, and served as a product leader at a healthcare AI startup. She was trained as a primary care physician, grounding her commercial and strategic work in a firsthand understanding of how care is delivered and where technology can meaningfully expand access. In direct alignment with Hippocratic AI’s founding principle of building technology committed to doing no harm, Dr. Jain believes generative AI has the potential to dramatically increase healthcare access globally, if built and tested responsibly.

Verlon Johnson. Chief Government and Corporate Affairs Officer at Acentra Health (McLean, Va.). Ms. Johnson brings nearly 25 years of experience at CMS and more than 30 years in public health policy and administration to her role leading the intersection of health policy and technology at Acentra Health. In 2025, Ms. Johnson spearheaded the launch of the Safe AI in Medicaid Alliance, a first-of-its-kind initiative establishing a standardized framework for ethical, secure and effective use of AI in Medicaid programs. The initiative has convened more than 400 members across 36 states and one U.S. territory. She serves as chair of the Medicaid and CHIP Payment and Access Commission, advising Congress on policies that affect the funding and modernization of Medicaid programs. During the Covid-19 pandemic, Ms. Johnson led the development of the State Medicaid & CHIP Telehealth Toolkit at IBM Watson Health, enabling states to rapidly scale digital care delivery for vulnerable populations. She also chairs the Cook County Health Foundation and serves on the board of the Illinois Public Health Institute, and received the “Velton Lacefield Award” from Anew: Building Beyond Violence and Abuse for her commitment to supporting survivors of domestic violence.

Stephanie Jones. Founder and CEO at iTAV (Hollywood, Fla.). Ms. Jones founded It Takes a Village Software and Services after watching her aging mother struggle to navigate the complex Medicare system, building a company whose software provides benefits-specific intelligence to empower better decision-making. Ms. Jones brings decades of healthcare technology and operations experience from executive roles at various health plans, including time spent overseeing Medicare and Medicaid HMO product design, growing her member portfolio as well as annual revenue. While at tech company Convey Health Solutions, she scaled the company’s business-to-business operating model from $30 million to $400 million in annual revenue over 10 years and was instrumental in taking the company public, ringing the New York Stock Exchange bell as a career milestone. Ms. Jones was named a Women We Admire “Top 50 Women Leader of Miami” in 2025 and received MIA Media Group‘s “Corporate Executive of the Year” honor in 2023. She serves on multiple boards, including Family Bridges in Chicago, and is chairman of the board of Girl Power Rocks.

Ashley Joseph. Chief Innovation Officer at LeanTaaS (Santa Clara, Calif.). Ms. Joseph defines, designs and builds new products at LeanTaaS that expand the company’s impact in healthcare operations, drawing on more than 20 years of experience in service operations strategy. Ms. Joseph previously led LeanTaaS’s infusion business for five years, more than tripling its size and expanding “iQueue for Infusion Centers” to more than 120 health systems and more than 800 infusion centers across the country. Before LeanTaaS, she was an early contributor to the creation and building of the service operations practice at McKinsey & Company, where she spent more than a decade grounding her expertise in operational strategy and innovation. She subsequently owned and operated a chain of service-based franchises for more than 10 years, working directly with the franchisor on service operations and strategy innovations.

Molly Kalinowski. Vice President of Managed Services at Pivot Point Consulting (Panama City, Fla.). Ms. Kalinowski leads a comprehensive healthcare managed services portfolio at Pivot Point Consulting, encompassing service desk operations and specialized Epic analyst teams. Her work has helped deliver four consecutive “Best in KLAS” rankings for managed IT services from 2023 through 2026, with service level agreements above 95% and client satisfaction scores exceeding 4.75 out of 5. Ms. Kalinowski introduced gender equity initiatives that established transparent promotion pathways and more inclusive leadership practices, resulting in a 40% increase in women advancing to senior roles. She draws on more than 15 years of experience in both clinical operations and IT, having previously served as information systems director of clinical applications at Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health and director of Epic ambulatory applications before that role. Pivot Point Consulting also earned “America’s Greatest Workplaces for Diversity” recognition from Newsweek in 2023.

LuAnn K. Kimker, MSN, RN. Senior Vice President of Clinical Innovation at Azara Healthcare (Boston). Ms. Kimker leads a team of 19 clinical innovation professionals at Azara Healthcare. She provides population health and value-based care strategy to more than 50% of federally qualified health centers and over half of primary care associations and health center-controlled networks in the U.S. Ms. Kimker developed and leads a value-based care workshop delivered to primary care associations and health center-controlled networks across the country, and played a central role in integrating clinical and customer success teams following Azara’s February 2025 merger with i2i Population Health, which together serve more than 1,000 community health centers, federally qualified health centers and clinically integrated networks reaching over 50 million Americans. Through her eight-year strategic partnership with the American Medical Association, she has integrated evidence-based clinical guidelines directly into the Azara DRVS platform, including new cholesterol management measures in 2025. At The Centers in Cleveland, her work contributed to growing a medication-assisted treatment cohort from 207 to 629 patients between 2023 and 2025. Azara Healthcare earned “Best in KLAS” for population health management for the fourth consecutive year in 2026.

Mara Lederman, PhD. Co-Founder and COO at Signal 1 (Toronto, Canada). Dr. Lederman oversees company strategy, sales, marketing, customer delivery and business operations at Signal 1, a health AI company, drawing on more than 20 years as a faculty member at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto where she was an award-winning researcher in economics. She was an early pioneer in executive-level education in data-driven decision-making, developing some of the first courses that taught leaders to view data and analytics as a strategic asset rather than an IT function. As site lead for the Creative Destruction Lab in Toronto, she more than tripled the program’s scale and launched its first healthcare-focused programming. At Signal 1, Dr. Lederman helps healthcare leaders address the economic and organizational challenges of AI adoption, advancing a conviction that successful AI in healthcare is not just about model performance but about trust, governance, sustainability and real value realization. She continues to serve as an adjunct professor at the Rotman School of Management.

Terri Lefort. President at Nordic International (Madison, Wis.). Ms. Lefort leads Nordic’s global strategy, sales, delivery and operations across markets outside the U.S., overseeing senior leaders and driving expansion of the company’s international footprint through acquisitions and scalable delivery models. Ms. Lefort increased earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation in the U.K./Europe market by $3.4 million USD and doubled the size of the Canadian business coming out of the pandemic. Over her career, she has helped more than 150 healthcare organizations worldwide successfully implement and optimize complex health IT systems like EHR platforms, supporting organizations in achieving the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society stage 6 and 7 milestones. Earlier in her career, she led the transformation of Canada’s first and only Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society stage 7 hospital, moving the organization from level 0 to 7 in just 3.5 years. She also developed a methodology to standardize clinical content across 25 acute care hospitals in Ontario. Ms. Lefort serves on the TECHNATION health board in Canada and participates as a panel moderator for KLAS Europe. Nordic was named a “Major Contender in Healthcare IT Services” by Everest Group in 2025 and earned “Best in KLAS” for clinical optimization in 2025.

Raeanna LeWarne, PharmD. CEO at RxWare (Dover, Del.). Dr. LeWarne rose quickly from vice president of product to COO to CEO at RxWare. She now leads a platform that connects data across EHRs, hub systems, specialty pharmacies and patient engagement channels to give pharmaceutical brands a clear understanding of where patients progress and where they stall in the prescription journey. Programs using RxWare have achieved an 82% consent completion rate across active programs, with a 35-fold increase in a rare disease program, and some programs have seen a 40-60% improvement in time to first fill. In the past month, Dr. LeWarne and her team signed two new top-10 pharmaceutical clients. An active pharmacist who left the corporate world during the pandemic to administer Covid-19 vaccinations at CVS Health, she brings a frontline clinical perspective to enterprise technology leadership in pharmaceutical patient access. Before founding HealthFreelance.com and joining RxWare, she served as president of ProCare HospiceCare and vice president of clinical services and sales at ProCare Rx.

Gili Lichtman Kurtz. Vice President of Partnerships at Hyro (New York City). Ms. Lichtman Kurtz architected the Hyro Alliance by embedding the company’s agentic AI directly into massive technology ecosystems health systems rely on. Under her leadership, Hyro was named a Microsoft “Partner of the Year,” and she was a core architect of the collaboration with Salesforce that integrated purpose-built agentic AI with Agentforce Health for Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health, which drove a 44% automation rate for repetitive calls and reduced patient call abandonment by 85%. This work earned Hyro the Salesforce “Partner Innovation Award in Healthcare” for 2025. Before Hyro, Ms. Lichtman Kurtz co-founded FairFly, an award-winning enterprise platform where she built global strategic partnerships, and served as senior startup business development manager focused on healthcare and life sciences at AWS. Hyro was included in the “New York Digital Health 100 for Patient Engagement” by Digital Health New York.

Amy Lukowski, PsyD. Vice President of Operations and Integration at Ovatient (Columbus, Ohio). Dr. Lukowski serves as the CEO’s operational counterpart at Ovatient, translating company strategy into disciplined execution across growth and marketing, clinical operations, technology, customer success, implementation, human resources, finance and administration, while owning Ovatient’s enterprise key performance indicator scorecard and operating review process. She was previously director of integrated behavioral health at Ovatient, where she developed the quality program for the behavioral health service line, established clinical metrics and key performance indicators, and contributed to a model of care in which behavioral health is integrated into a seamless virtual care experience rather than siloed. A licensed psychologist with deep experience in digital health, behavioral health and clinical operations, Dr. Lukowski’s career trajectory includes serving as senior director of mental health content at Teladoc/Livongo/myStrength, senior behavioral health consultant at CirrusMD and clinical director at Denver-based National Jewish Health.

Shelley Mannino. Executive Director at Florida Trusted Data Sharing Organization (East Lansing, Mich.). Ms. Mannino, who also serves as executive vice president of Velatura Health Information Exchange, is leading Florida’s Trusted Data Sharing Organization, a first-of-its-kind nonprofit built on the premise that families should control their own health, financial, legal and insurance records. Her flagship initiative, the “Digital Backpack,” organizes families’ most critical documents into a single structured hub designed for the moments when natural disasters or crises make records hardest to find. This is a particularly critical need in a state where hurricanes routinely sever people from essential records. Ms. Mannino’s most recognized prior accomplishment is a Broward County youth mental health crisis notification initiative, for which she was named a DirectTrust “Interop Hero” in 2024. The program, which was built with the Broward Data Collaborative across multiple state agencies, health IT vendors and community organizations, surfaces crisis notifications to the right community partners in real time when a child is placed on an involuntary psychiatric hold, ensuring that for the roughly 24,000 children under age 17 affected annually in Florida, a support network is already in place upon their 72-hour release. Before Florida Trusted Data Sharing Organization, Ms. Mannino spent more than eight years at the Michigan Health Information Network as vice president of operations.

Emily Mata. Vice President of Marketing and Communications at Velatura (East Lansing, Mich.). Ms. Mata leads the full marketing and communications function for Velatura Public Benefit, a multi-state health information exchange and health AI organization, managing brand strategy, product marketing, public relations, event management, website oversight and executive communications across multiple affiliated brands simultaneously. Ms. Mata brings subject-matter fluency, with a unique ability to speak directly to interoperability standards, Health Information Exchange policy and federal programs without requiring technical translation. Thus, she is able to produce messaging that is more specific and more credible than communications built on surface-level familiarity. Before joining Velatura, she served as director of public relations and brand standards and communications manager at the Michigan Health Information Network, where she developed deep expertise in health data exchange. She was recognized as a “Marketing Rising Star” by Swaay.Health in 2024 and serves on the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society Michigan chapter board. 

Sarah Matt, MD. Founder and Principal at Vital Werks (Fayetteville, N.Y.). Dr. Matt is a board-eligible surgeon who spent two decades building and scaling health technology products at the enterprise level. She is the founder of Vital Werks, a healthcare strategy and innovation advisory firm. Prior roles include vice president of healthcare markets and Oracle cloud infrastructure at Oracle Health, where she collaborated on strategy for the company’s next-generation EHR platform and led global go-to-market across a $28 billion portfolio. Prior, at ESO, she oversaw a public safety and emergency medical services technology platform and grew recurring revenue from $60 million to $95 million annual recurring revenue, contributing to the company’s exit to Vista Equity Partners. At NextGen Healthcare, she served as chief of staff to the chief strategy officer and led a cross-functional team of more than 80 people for six years. Dr. Matt also served as chief strategy officer at Sovato, a remote robotic surgery platform, where she developed reimbursement models for remote surgical procedures and built a $1.5 million pre-launch pipeline. She is the author of “The Borderless Healthcare Revolution,” practices medicine as a volunteer physician serving uninsured patients, and teaches clinical reasoning at Syracuse, N.Y.-based SUNY Upstate Medical University.

Dana McCalley. Vice President of Value-Based Care at Navina (New York City). Ms. McCalley owns strategy and execution for Navina’s work with health systems, ACOs and risk-bearing provider groups, supporting more than 20,000 clinicians and care team members across 1,300-plus clinics and over 3 million patient lives. Her work serves to bridge the operational gap between value-based contract requirements and what primary care physicians can execute during a patient visit. The 20,000-plus clinicians her programs touch use Navina’s AI copilot at an 86% weekly active usage rate, a level of sustained engagement that reflects her approach of refining AI workflows alongside front-line clinicians rather than handing down finished solutions. An independent study found Navina cut chart review time for complex visits by 40% and reduced chart review burden by 24%. Navina earned gold “Stevie Awards” for AI in healthcare in 2025 and 2026, and “Best in KLAS” for clinician digital workflows in 2025. Prior to joining Navina, Ms. McCalley was at Honest Medical Group, where she stood up clinical documentation improvement programs across more than 100 locations and 250-plus providers. At Millennium Physician Group, she helped 700-plus clinicians provide value-based care to roughly 230,000 patients, contributing to more than $159 million in CMS ACO shared savings. 

Dria McCluskey, RN, MSN. Senior Vice President of Innovation and Technology at Sound Physicians (Nashville, Tenn.). At Sound Physicians, Ms. McCluskey manages vendor relationships, product and vendor evaluations, and the development of telemedicine service lines like tele-hospitalists, tele-skilled nursing facilities, tele-home health and nurse practitioner support models. Her most significant accomplishment came in 2025 when the company’s EHR vendor abruptly announced it was exiting the market, and she worked collaboratively with internal teams to design a robust request for proposal for replacement. Rather than accepting an out-of-the-box solution, Ms. McCluskey worked with the winning vendor to customize its platform for the organization’s unique telemedicine and remote consulting workflows, adding application programming interfaces for clinician-to-clinician encounters, Slack-like messaging, and state licensing rules baked into the workflow alongside Sound Physicians’ own provider matching algorithms. She then successfully launched the new platform in less than nine months, resulting in improved physician satisfaction and treat-in-place rates. 

Kat McDavitt. President and Founding Partner at Innsena (Atlanta). Ms. McDavitt is the president and founding partner at healthcare technology business consulting company Innsena. She is an award-winning leader in health data exchange who has brokered numerous data sharing agreements between unlikely partners across the U.S., receiving the prestigious “Leadership Excellence Award” from the Civitas Networks for Health community for her work. As CEO of the Zorya Foundation, she leads a nonprofit that has provided childcare grants to more than 200 grantees, including nurses, informaticists, public health workers, certified nursing assistants and medical assistants. In 2025, the foundation shifted to full-year funding and launched a Kansas Direct Service Worker Program that provided 45 grants in six months, with 82% of recipients being single-parent households. Ms. McDavitt also founded and hosts the Health Tech Talk Show, a weekly live online show that has grown to 3,500 viewers and features top healthcare leaders. She and her Innsena partner donated $100,000 to CancerX in February 2024, becoming the organization’s first impact partner. Innsena was ranked 30th on the Atlanta Business Chronicle‘s fastest-growing private companies list in 2024.

Kathleen McGrow, DNP, RN. CNIO at Microsoft (Redmond, Wash.). Dr. McGrow advances the strategic integration of nursing practice, clinical innovation and emerging technologies at Microsoft, ensuring that AI in healthcare is clinician-grounded, nurse-governed and human-centered. She is the author of “Empowering Nurses with Technology: A Practical Guide to Nurse Informatics” and was inducted as a fellow of the American Academy of Nursing. Dr. McGrow is a nationally recognized leader who has been instrumental in shaping how health systems and technology organizations engage nurses as co-designers, evaluators and stewards of AI, moving responsible adoption beyond experimentation toward scalable implementation grounded in real-world nursing workflows. She co-chairs the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society nursing innovation advisory committee and serves as an adjunct clinical instructor at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Nursing. She was recognized with the 2023 Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society “ChangeMaker Award” and is a fellow of the organization.

Holly Miller. CEO at Collette Health (Noblesville, Ind.). Ms. Miller leads Collette Health, a virtual care platform serving 175-plus hospitals nationwide, having made the strategic decision to transform the company from a virtual patient observation solution into a comprehensive virtual nursing platform after recognizing that hospitals were using the technology for nursing tasks such as admissions, discharges and patient education. Ms. Miller empowered her clinical and technical teams to develop virtual nursing workflow solutions, then in 2025 acquired the Virtual Nursing Academy. She has helped embed clinical implementation expertise directly into Collette Health’s offerings so that hospitals receive technology as well as structured guidance on designing governance frameworks and workflows that reduce burden. Collette Health earned “Best in KLAS” for virtual sitting and nursing in both 2025 and 2026, the No. 1 ranking in the category. Before Collette Health, Ms. Miller was chief revenue officer and vice president of sales and marketing at PlayMaker Health, which was then acquired by Trella Health.

Missy Miller. Chief Marketing Officer at Waystar (Louisville, Ky.). Ms. Miller leads brand awareness amplification, client acquisition, engagement and advocacy programs at Waystar, driving loyalty and growth for a healthcare payments technology company that has been named to Time Magazine’s “TIME100 Most Influential Companies” list and honored with its “Impact in AI” award. Ms. Miller brings commercial, marketing and corporate strategy leadership experience spanning high-growth companies to Fortune‘s “Fortune 10” organizations, most recently serving as chief growth officer at a private investment firm where she led strategic initiatives across portfolio companies to drive transformational growth. Before that, she held high-impact, cross-functional roles at ZirMed, which was acquired by Bain Capital in 2017, and at McKesson’s provider technologies division. Ms. Miller was named one of Women We Admire’s “Top 50 Women Leaders in Healthcare” for 2022 and is a member of Chief, a private network designed to enable and empower executive leaders.

Ali Morin. CNIO at symplr (Houston). Ms. Morin, a board-certified nursing informaticist and former pediatric bedside nurse, leads the strategic development and integration of clinical programs that power healthcare workforce management at symplr. These programs encompass clinical communication and collaboration, staffing and scheduling, and human resources and talent management systems that have earned multiple “Best in KLAS” designations. Ms. Morin applies more than 20 years of nursing informatics expertise, alongside firsthand clinical experience, to design technology solutions that acknowledge the realities of clinical care, overseeing integration of AI-powered capabilities that give nurses more time for patients while improving operational efficiency. She co-chairs the American Organization for Nursing Leadership’s leadership, innovation, technology and transformation committee, serves on the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society vendor CNO/CNIO working group, and previously served on the Alliance for Nursing Informatics policy committee. In these roles, she advocates for nurse representation in strategic decision-making and ensures those closest to patient care have a voice in shaping the technologies and policies that impact their work.

Kris Nessa. Chief Technology Officer of Healthcare at SHI International (Somerset, N.J.). Ms. Nessa leads strategic direction, development and delivery of digital health and IT transformation services for healthcare provider organizations across the United States at SHI International, working directly with C-suite leaders to translate complex technical capabilities into actionable strategies around cloud, AI, cybersecurity and data platforms. A former healthcare executive with firsthand experience leading EHR transitions and navigating regulatory and operational complexities, Ms. Nessa has built and scaled a new healthcare-focused business unit at SHI, developing advisory and assessment-based services that help provider organizations evaluate and modernize their IT environments. She is particularly focused on helping organizations approach AI adoption responsibly, guiding clients on governance, risk and compliance considerations for clinical AI rather than just technical capabilities. She serves on the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society public policy committee, contributing to national and global health IT policy discussions. Before SHI, she led a comprehensive EHR transformation achieving the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society stage 7 designation and reducing sepsis mortality from more than 30% to single digits, saving 175-plus lives.

Lynne Nowak, MD. Chief Data and Analytics Officer for Surescripts (Arlington, Va.). Dr. Nowak joined Surescripts in 2023 as the company’s first chief data and analytics officer, bringing nearly 30 years of healthcare experience as a board-certified internist and as a leader of data science, product and business analytics teams. She spent 15 years practicing as a board-certified internist, founding a hospitalist practice, serving as a hospice medical director, and building clinical intuition. Then she made a pivot to the data center, aiming to solve systemic problems. At Surescripts, she leads the teams turning the 30.5 billion annual patient data transactions into purposeful intelligence to inform and accelerate decisions, keeping patient care on track. This includes providing insights that reach clinicians at the point of care, flag unfilled prescriptions before patients fall through the cracks, and power the automation that approves prior authorizations in 18 seconds.

Jennifer O’Brien. CIO at Seven Hills Foundation (Worcester, Mass.). Ms. O’Brien leads enterprisewide IT  strategy, operations and governance for large, multi-site behavioral healthcare organizations, overseeing infrastructure, applications, data and analytics, cybersecurity, telecommunications and vendor management while ensuring compliance across complex behavioral health environments governed by heightened data privacy requirements. One of Ms. O’Brien’s most impactful accomplishments was leading the consolidation of disparate systems into a unified human resources information system that improved data accuracy, streamlined onboarding and internal mobility, and provided leaders with better workforce insights, thus supporting staff retention in a highly competitive labor market. She is recognized for building trust-based bridges between IT and operations, and for maximizing the value of existing platforms through thoughtful contract negotiations and vendor alignment, consistently delivering significant cost savings without sacrificing quality or security. She serves on the board of directors for Massachusetts State Court Appointed Special Advocates for Children and as a mentor for the Massachusetts Electronic Health Institute.

Michelle O’Connor. President and CEO at Meditech (Canton, Mass.). Ms. O’Connor has spent more than three decades at Meditech, rising to CEO in 2021 and overseeing the company’s evolution from a legacy EHR vendor into a cloud-native, AI-enabled health IT platform serving hospitals of all sizes. Under her leadership, Meditech’s Expanse EHR has been recognized as a leading intelligent EHR designed for modern healthcare delivery, and the company’s Meditech-as-a-Service cloud model has democratized access to enterprise-grade technology for smaller hospitals and rural health systems. Ms. O’Connor has prioritized key strategic partnerships, including a collaboration with Google for search and summarization using large language models to transform how clinicians interact with patient data. In 2026, Meditech was named a Google Cloud “Partner Award” winner and earned its seventh consecutive No. 1 ranking in the “KLAS Acute Care EHR & Patient Accounting Small 1-150 Bed” segment, while also being named a Gartner Magic Quadrant leader for clinical communication and collaboration. She is a member of Meditech’s board of directors and was named among the “Top 25 Healthcare Software Executives of 2025” by The Healthcare Technology Report.

Rachana Pandey. Associate Vice President of Humana Technology at Humana Inc (Louisville, Ky.). Recently promoted to associate vice president of technology within Humana Technology, Ms. Pandey now leads an end user technology team that serves more than 4 million military members and their families, bringing the AI and digital transformation expertise she developed leading care delivery technology for Humana’s primary care organization across CenterWell’s 400-plus clinics, serving more than 500,000 patients. Ms. Pandey executed generative AI-powered telephonic call summarization between nurses and patients and automated the summarization of discharge documents, delivering 15-30% productivity gains and meaningful administrative burden reduction for doctors and nurses nationwide. Her team also built a proprietary prior authorization and referral system that replaced a vendor solution, contributing $8 million in annual savings. She also led the implementation of Humana’s first public cloud presence for Humana’s website, serving more than 15 million members, and oversaw a complex EHR transformation to Athena for care management capabilities across CenterWell’s national clinic network. Ms. Pandey served on Humana’s Women in Technology advisory board and is chief strategy officer of priSHE.

Shelli Pavone. Co-Founder and President at Inlightened (Alpharetta, Ga.). Ms. Pavone built Inlightened into a technology-enabled platform with a curated network reaching 900,000-plus healthcare professionals across 100-plus specialties. She also established partnerships with more than 20 leading global life sciences organizations. In 2025, Ms. Pavone led her team to achieve $1 million in gross profit and more than 120% year-over-year growth, increasing the number of experts in Inlightened’s network by 72% over 2024 and enabling clients to access hard-to-reach expertise from payers, advanced practice providers, oncologists and bio-coordinators. The company was acquired by Locum Tenens in August 2023. Ms. Pavone continues as Co-Founder and president following the company’s acquisition. Ms. Pavone is a recognized thought leader featured in PharmExec, Kevin MD and Transformation in Trials, and published an essay in the Boston Business Journal‘s “In Her Own Words” column. 

Nancy Phillips. CISO at Ensemble (Cincinnati, Ohio). Ms. Phillips, a five-time CISO with more than 30 years of experience, is responsible for protecting vast volumes of clinical and financial data across more than 35 health systems at Ensemble, supporting operations that manage tens of millions of healthcare transactions annually. Ms. Phillips leads Ensemble’s AI security and governance strategy, designing security architectures that enable AI-enabled technology innovation at scale without compromising HIPAA compliance, data integrity or patient trust. She has consistently led organizations through the transition from perimeter-based defenses to zero-trust security models and from reactive incident response to proactive, intelligence-driven threat detection. A technical advisor and board member to cybersecurity startup organizations, she is also known for building and mentoring high-performing, multidisciplinary security teams and creating opportunities for emerging leaders. Ensemble has earned “Best in KLAS” for end-to-end revenue cycle outsourcing six times, including this year’s highest ranking.

Stacy Pur. Senior Vice President of Product at eFax by Consensus Cloud Solutions (Los Angeles). Ms. Pur, a registered nurse, leads the strategic vision and product innovation roadmap for eFax, where she transforms cloud fax from a final delivery method into a starting point for digital transformation through AI integration, semantic interoperability and support for various standards. Ms. Pur was previously chief nurse epidemiologist and researcher at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago and director of infection prevention at a major health system, bringing a 12-publication research portfolio focused on patient and worker safety that grounds her product and marketing leadership in clinical reality. She has re-engineered eFax’s development environment to accelerate delivery of high-value intelligence at the point of care, integrating advanced AI and intelligence tools that have produced end-to-end solutions modernizing clinical workflows and improving patient outcomes. eFax was included in G2’s 2025 “Best Software Awards” list.

Heidi Raines. Chief Strategy Officer at Sentact (Nashville, Tenn.). Ms. Raines founded Performance Health Partners in 2015 and grew it into a national leader in healthcare safety technology, earning the No. 1 “Best in KLAS” ranking for healthcare safety, risk and compliance software for four consecutive years, including 2026. 100% of respondents said the platform fulfills its promises and is part of their long-term plans. Performance Health Partners was acquired by Sentact in late 2025, and Ms. Raines stepped into an expanded role as chief strategy officer, now applying her experience to a broader clinical operations ecosystem spanning safety, quality, experience and regulatory readiness. Her book, Shared Voices: A Framework for Patient and Employee Safety in Healthcare, became a Forbes and Amazon bestseller and a No. 1 new release in several healthcare categories. She holds a preceptor faculty position in Tulane University’s Master of Health Administration program, and previously served as board president of the American College of Healthcare Executives’ Women’s Healthcare Executive Network. 

Chevon Rariy, MD. Chief Medical Technology Officer at Visana Health (Minneapolis). Dr. Rariy leads clinical strategy and innovation at Visana Health, expanding virtual-first, evidence-based care across gynecology, hormonal health and comorbid chronic conditions including weight management, hypertension, diabetes and thyroid disorders. A study she led, independently verified by Optum Advisory, demonstrates total cost of care savings of $3,429 per member in six months, reflecting a deliberately designed clinical model in which patients are matched with dedicated providers and supported through relationship-based care, enabling earlier intervention and sustained engagement. Dr. Rariy continues to practice clinically, having been recruited to reduce specialist wait times for endocrinology that were up to six months or longer, managing complex cases across perimenopause, PCOS and insulin resistance. She recently received her obesity medicine certification and joined the Society of Women’s Health Research clinical advisory board. Dr. Rariy is also Co-Founder of Equity in STEMM, Innovation & AI, which collaborates with academia, industry and policymakers to build a pipeline of diverse leaders shaping healthcare innovation, and serves as inaugural committee member of the Food and Drug Administration digital health advisory committee. 

Nishi Rawat, MD. Chief Clinical Officer at Bamboo Health (Louisville, Ky.). Dr. Rawat leads the development, launch and implementation of clinical strategy and product innovation at Bamboo Health, including “Bamboo Bridge,” the company’s behavioral healthcare navigation platform, which has been deployed across multiple states and delivered a 20% reduction in avoidable emergency department visits and inpatient utilization along with improved follow-up after crisis events. She guides how Bamboo Health responsibly integrates AI into its solutions, ensuring models are grounded in clinical expertise and designed for the complex needs of high-risk patient populations, while advancing Bamboo’s real-time care intelligence platform that impacts more than 3 billion patient encounters annually. Dr. Rawat co-founded OpenBeds, a company dedicated to improving access to mental health and substance use disorder treatment, which was acquired by Appriss Health, now Bamboo Health. Earlier, she spent years as an emergency medicine and critical care physician at Baltimore-based Johns Hopkins Hospital, where she treated significant numbers of patients with substance use disorder. She actively mentors women within and across departments and was recognized by Bamboo Health’s KLAS “Points of Light Award” and MedTech Breakthrough “Best Care Orchestration Solution” recognition in 2024.

Stephanie Rock. Senior Vice President of Product and Client Delivery at IntusCare (Providence, R.I.). Ms. Rock leads product, design, implementation, customer support, training and risk adjustment services at IntusCare, overseeing technology built specifically for the program of all-inclusive care for the elderly, which is the nation’s most complex and comprehensive care model for disabled seniors. Since joining IntusCare in January 2024, Ms. Rock made the strategic decision to combine product and client delivery into a single function, then led the design and launch of CareHub EHR, the first PACE-specific care management platform, which has driven more than 7x revenue growth and achieved approximately 27% market share with an average implementation time of 128 days. Within that period, her department scaled 25x, increasing from two to 50 employees while maintaining execution speed and quality. Prior to IntusCare, Ms. Rock spent seven years at Chicago-based Oak Street Health, rising to vice president of data product and contributing to the organization’s ranking as No. 1 in net dollars saved in the ACO REACH pilot program, a 100% quality score and a 51% reduction in hospital admissions. She is an angel investor and startup advisor.

Galia Rosen Schwarz. CEO and Co-Founder at C8 Health (Wilmington, Del.). Ms. Rosen Schwarz leads strategy, operations and vision for C8 Health’s AI-powered clinical knowledge platform, now deployed across more than 100 U.S. hospitals including 30 top academic medical centers such as New York City-based Mount Sinai, San Francisco-based UCSF Health and Boston-based Brigham & Women’s. The platform follows a repeatable 31.5-day deployment model that achieves 90-plus % sustained clinician adoption after 12 months. At Galveston, Texas-based UTMB Health, C8 Health drove a 9.1% absolute increase in perioperative glucose compliance within three months, with 39% of previously non-compliant providers becoming compliant, projecting $1.5 million in annual savings. At Cleveland-based MetroHealth, 100% clinician adoption was paired with a fivefold improvement in timely protocol access, improving from 15% to 79%, and a quadrupling of satisfaction with knowledge delivery, rising from 22% to 86%. In 2025, Ms. Rosen Schwarz closed a $12 million Series A from Team8, 10D and Vertex Ventures Israel and finalized a partnership with the American Society of Anesthesiologists that launched “Evidence Compare,” an automated tool aligning hospital protocols with national guidelines. She has built one of healthtech’s most gender-balanced organizations, with women comprising 50% of C8’s management team and 40% of its overall workforce. She was named No. 36 in Techround‘s “50WomenInTech” and received a Stevie’s bronze “Woman of the Year” in healthcare recognition.

Emily Schmitz, PharmD. President and CEO at ActualMeds (Tampa, Fla.). Dr. Schmitz leads ActualMeds, bringing nearly 30 years of healthcare industry experience across hospital, home infusion, ambulatory care, specialty pharmacy and geriatrics settings to a company focused on merging technology-enabled solutions with clinical expertise and services. Dr. Schmitz founded SRx Consultant Group to provide creative solutions to patient-related medication issues in long-term care and managed care settings, growing the company year-over-year before it was acquired by ActualMeds in 2021. Her work has helped multiple health plans significantly increase medication adherence performance and star ratings, and she is passionate about reaching high-risk patients to resolve social determinants of health challenges that are often the barriers preventing members from adhering to medication regimens. She believes that for high-risk members, automation has its place but real results come from human interaction with informed experts. Dr. Schmitz served as CEO of SRx from 2008 to 2021 and as executive vice president of managed care services at ActualMeds before assuming the CEO role.

Amy Shellhart. Chief Solutions Officer at WellSky (Overland Park, Kan.). Ms. Shellhart leads a team of approximately 140 product management professionals who support more than 20,000 client sites across acute, post-acute and community care settings. She has direct responsibility over WellSky’s home health, hospice and personal care solutions, serving more than 3,000 clients. Ms. Shellhart was instrumental in shaping the vision for a unified set of technologies that bring together interoperability, data exchange and analytics, and created WellSky’s data platform team, overseeing the development of an infrastructure that ingests data from core solutions, establishes an interoperability layer, and enables that data to be used for a range of operational and clinical insights. She also established Sky Studio, WellSky’s AI center of excellence, which focuses on developing capabilities like summarization and data extraction tools that reduce documentation burden for nurses and caregivers. An advisory board member for Kno2’s qualified health information network, Ms. Shellhart was recognized as an “Interop Hero” by DirectTrust in 2022. WellSky has earned “Best in KLAS” for personal care in 2024 and 2025.

Stacy Simpson. Chief Marketing Officer at Athenahealth (Boston). Ms. Simpson leads all global marketing and communications functions at Athenahealth, overseeing segment marketing, brand and communications, and research and editorial strategy. She is tasked with overseeing media, demand generation, advertising, content and communications strategies that drive awareness, consideration and advocacy for the brand. Ms. Simpson brings more than 25 years of experience in technology marketing and communications to the role, with a track record of building and sustaining brand strategies that generate market demand, drive revenue growth and enhance brand perception at scale. She joined Athenahealth in September 2022 and is also a champion for purpose-led organizations that drive positive change for all stakeholders. Before Athenahealth, Ms. Simpson served as chief marketing officer and head of corporate responsibility, diversity, equity and inclusion at Genpact, global head of marketing and communications at Publicis Sapient, and head of global communications and brand marketing at IAC/InterActiveCorp, where she oversaw marketing for more than 100 consumer internet and media brands.

Stephanie Smith, MD. Vice President of Medical Operations and AI Automation at Accuity (Mount Laurel, N.J.). Dr. Smith provides clinical oversight for “Amplifi,” Accuity’s AI engine trained on physician-reviewed, payer-adjudicated inpatient charts, directing its clinical logic and shaping it to reflect how clinical-coding determinations are made in practice. She leads medical operations across a team of more than 350 physicians and coders, ensuring compliance and consistency in clinical-coding interpretations across diverse health system environments. At Dallas-based Baylor Scott & White Health, deployment expanded from an initial pilot to 26 hospitals, and within six months the system captured more than $20 million in incremental revenue with an annualized projection of approximately $45 million. In cases where opportunity was identified, the case mix index increased by an average of 3.5%. At an enterprise level, Accuity’s work contributed more than $800 million in cash benefit delivered to health system clients in 2025. Dr. Smith’s career spans hospital medicine, payer organizations and revenue cycle operations, and she previously served as medical director of community and state at UnitedHealthcare and medical senior director at Cigna. Accuity won a “Platinum Pinnacle Award” from Pinnacle Awards for clinical decision AI in 2026 and a gold recognition for “Best Use of AI in Healthcare” at the 2025 Merit Awards.

Pramila Srinivasan, PhD. CEO at CharmHealth (Pleasanton, Calif.). Dr. Srinivasan built CharmHealth from a patient portal launched in 2007 into a comprehensive cloud-based health IT platform spanning EHR, practice management, patient engagement, telehealth, and an open app marketplace that supports clinics and patients across the country. As CEO, she sets the strategic direction and product roadmap while consistently emphasizing that AI is only as effective as the underlying data infrastructure it can access, championing interoperability as the foundation for meaningful AI deployment in clinical settings. Dr. Srinivasan has created a first-of-its-kind health IT innovation ecosystem through CharmHealth’s annual “Innovation Challenge,” now in its fifth year, which funds and mentors early-stage healthtech startups, including a new agentic AI category introduced in 2025. She is also founder and president of The Brain Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to advancing translational research for individuals with neurological disorders and developmental conditions. CharmHealth received the Business Intelligence Group’s “Excellence in Customer Service” award for 2024. 

Julia Strandberg. Chief Business Leader for Connected Care at Philips (Amsterdam). Ms. Strandberg leads Philips’ globally integrated Connected Care portfolio, which supports 91 of the top 100 U.S. hospitals and 90 of the top 100 hospitals globally, overseeing remote patient monitoring platforms, AI-enabled clinical decision support and enterprise informatics systems that unify data from disparate sources into cohesive workflows. At Jackson Memorial Hospital in Miami, Ms. Strandberg guided the adoption of enterprise monitoring as a service, a subscription-based monitoring model that saved approximately 13,331 staff hours through workflow automation, reduced patient transport processes from an average of five minutes to 3.9 seconds, and saved an average of eight hours daily for central monitoring unit telemetry technicians. She has also championed maternal health equity initiatives, including a remote patient monitoring program for high-risk pregnant Medicaid recipients in Georgia and a collaboration with the March of Dimes to deploy mobile health centers into maternal health deserts. As executive sponsor of “Philips Women Lead,” Philips’ largest employee resource group with more than 4,500 members worldwide, Ms. Strandberg has driven gender representation results: women now comprise 50% of Connected Care leadership and 42% of senior positions. She serves on the Royal Philips executive committee, the World Economic Forum’s digital health technology board and the AdvaMed Digital Health Board.

Jennifer Tullio. Vice President, Interoperability and Data Transparency at enGen (Pittsburgh, Pa.). Ms. Tullio leads the seamless and secure exchange of health information and ensures stringent compliance with critical data transparency regulations at enGen, a Highmark Health affiliate, drawing on more than 25 years of progressive IT leadership within the organization. Ms. Tullio co-founded Highmark Health’s “Women in Tech” internal business resource group, championing diversity in technology and creating concrete mentorship and networking opportunities for women in science, technology, engineering and mathematics. She has been recognized as a panelist at the Women’s Leader Forum for the AI Summit in Washington, D.C., and serves as a board member of both the Athena Awards and the Pittsburgh Technology Council. Beyond her professional roles, Ms. Tullio volunteers at local food banks and champions wounded veterans through the “Tunnel to Towers” and “Wounded Warrior” programs. Her leadership is defined by building trust-based relationships with stakeholders while fostering an inclusive environment where diverse perspectives drive innovation.

Melissa Ursi. CEO and Founder at Quoris (Lewes, Del.). Ms. Ursi co-founded Quoris, which carries forward 26 years of healthcare IT expertise from ROI International and now supports healthcare organizations across more than 10 countries. Ms. Ursi was voted into the role of managing partner at ROI International by all five of her partners and has since built a people-first culture at Quoris grounded in trust, partnership and integrity. She was recently featured on the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives’s Leader to Leader podcast with its president and CEO, speaking about leading through change and building organizations that hold up under pressure. With more than 20 years building high-performing teams and driving global expansion, Ms. Ursi is a recognized voice in healthcare transformation who participates in thought leadership at major industry events including the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society and ViVE. She is also a vocal champion for the advancement of women in healthcare and technology, actively creating space for the next generation of female leaders.

Seema Verma. Executive Vice President and General Manager of Oracle Health & Life Sciences (Austin, Texas). Ms. Verma is the executive vice president and general manager of Oracle Health and Life Sciences, where she’s responsible for Oracle’s clinical and clinical trials applications portfolio. She brings more than 25 years of experience leading transformative initiatives across the healthcare industry. In her current role, she’s spearheading the development of Oracle’s next-generation EHR, transforming it into a clinical asset to help improve care delivery. She’s also focused on closing the gap between clinical research and clinical care to help improve patient outcomes. Ms. Verma was the administrator of CMS from 2017 to 2021. In this role, she developed and implemented the federal administration’s healthcare plan to advance value-based care, innovation, interoperability and price transparency while reducing drug prices and regulations through her historic “Patients over Paperwork” initiative. Prior, she founded and sold a national health policy consulting company and worked as a vice president for policy and planning for a public hospital, public health department and health system. She currently is on the USC Price School board of councilors.

India Watson, DSL, MSN, RN. Senior Director of Care Strategies at MCG Health (Seattle). Dr. Watson leads the strategic direction, modernization and delivery of MCG Health’s care strategies function, which provides clinical and technical consulting to more than 3,200 hospitals, a majority of U.S. health plans, and many state and federal government agencies. With more than 30 years of healthcare experience, Dr. Watson uniquely bridges clinical decision integrity with sustainable technology adoption, ensuring that evidence-based clinical guidance is not simply implemented but operationalized, embedded within workflows and aligned to performance metrics. She has led utilization management and medical management transformation initiatives that integrate evidence-based clinical decision support with AI. Dr. Watson serves as a volunteer on the Case Management Society of America education committee and is a member of Women Business Leaders of the U.S. Health Care Industry Foundation. MCG Health has earned the KLAS “Points of Light Award.”

Suzanne Wogelius. Vice President of Product Management at Hyphen (Hartford, Conn.). Ms. Wogelius leads the scaling of a Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources-native, payer-agnostic platform creating the infrastructure for modern value-based care, overseeing solutions that enable real-time data exchange, sustainable payment pathways and care coordination infrastructure for health plans, providers, pharmacies and social care organizations. Ms. Wogelius led product strategy and delivery for Hyphen’s pharmacy assistant solution, which expanded the connected pharmacy network to more than 600 community pharmacies with demonstrated results in medication adherence, patient satisfaction and quality outcomes. She also drove the rapid deployment of Social Care Claims under Massachusetts’ 1115 waiver, a payer-agnostic billing solution that within just six months saw 23 organizations submit more than 98,500 claims, generating $11.56 million in reimbursements and establishing a sustainable payment pathway for community-based organizations. Hyphen has earned KLAS “Points of Light Awards” in 2023, 2024 and 2026, and was recognized as a key partner in a Gartner HCLS “Eye on Innovation Award” in 2025.

Debra Wong, MD. Vice President of Development and Integration of Clinical Strategy and Medical Director at AccessHope (Duarte, Calif.). Dr. Wong provides clinical thought leadership and strategy for AccessHope, a digital health company delivering remote expert oncology opinions to approximately 10 million members across more than 700 employers and health plans, including over 70 “Fortune 500” companies. A triple board-certified physician in medical oncology, hospice and palliative medicine and internal medicine, Dr. Wong led and presented a population-based study at the 2025 American Society of Clinical Oncology Quality Care Symposium, peer-reviewed and published in the JCO Oncology Practice, analyzing 5,137 expert case reviews and demonstrating that the platform recommended changes in cancer treatment in 52% of cases, with patients in socioeconomically disadvantaged and non-urban areas showing 25% higher odds of receiving treatment recommendations. She shapes how AccessHope’s physician- and patient-facing technology platforms are developed, deployed and optimized, defines the clinically meaningful metrics that anchor the platform and leads initiatives to reduce administrative burden for both AccessHope’s physician reviewers and the local treating oncologists who receive expert opinions. AccessHope was awarded “Best Virtual Care Solution Provider” in the MedTech Breakthrough Awards program in 2025.

At Becker's 4th Annual CEO + CFO Roundtable, taking place November 2–5 in Chicago, more than 1,500 hospital and health system executives tackle decisions that determine whether organizations thrive or merely survive: protecting margins under cost pressure, choosing where to grow, renegotiating payer relationships, stabilizing the workforce and proving real ROI on technology. This is where leaders work through them together, face-to-face. Apply for complimentary registration now.