

CEO Stephanie Gravenor and fellow Ignite Fire Pitch Winners Christine Lum Lung with Origin Health and Joanna Nathan with Prana Thoracic were invited to speak at the 7th Annual Women at HLTH luncheon. Ayse McCracken MC’d the event, highlighting the additional challenges that women founders face in raising capital, and challenged the audience to support women leaders, flipping the script to lift each other up: “we need to have a mindset of abundance and not scarcity”.
Through Ignite, Medecipher has benefited from the mentorship of healthcare leaders such as Ini Ekiko, VP Information Systems and Amanda Hammel, CIO of Memorial Hermann, and been given a platform to tell our story.
If you know women founders who would be interested in learning more about Ignite, please let us know!
Musings from HLTH
- impact…“small changes over a long period of time equal large impact.” At a fireside chat, AWS leaders Aaron Martin (VP of Healthcare, Amazon) and Nworah Ayogu, MD (Chief Medical Officer, Amazon Health) shared their roadmap for Amazon Health – staying focused on their core competency of connecting buyers and sellers, doing something really well for a small subset and scaling it, incremental changes on a large scale will improve access.
- what’s next… “we’ve seen innovation in the lower acuity space with primary care, we’re seeing the next level of need around higher acuity.” Investor and operator Julie Yoo, General Partner, a16z shared that the first years of the pandemic were marked on opportunities to innovate in the lower acuity space, with telehealth and remote patient monitoring being two areas that received a lot of investment. Now, they are shifting focus to innovation in the acute care setting.
- transforming the CEO role to attract more women… “Silver lining of the pandemic, empathetic leaders, high EQ, caring brings positive culture” – Mindy Kairey, Korn Ferry (more here: https://www.kornferry.com/insights/featured-topics/diversity-equity-inclusion/on-getting-to-the-top-today-women-ceos-speak)
- creating a culture of entrepreneurship… Jessica Beegle, Chief Innovation Officer Lifepoint Health shared that “setting expectations for the process” was one of the most important learnings she brought to health system innovation from her experiences at Google and AWS. When employees have an idea for a project, they need to know that there’s an internal process for vetting it. She has heard countless times that people submitted ideas, but never heard back. She aims to create a culture of entrepreneurship by supporting innovative ideas, and giving them the feedback they deserve.