A Supportive Health IT Social Community – Searching for Women in Healthcare AI

As many of you know, we’ve been heads down finalizing all the details for the EXPO.health conference we organize.  It’s an amazing event that brings together the health IT community in a unique effort to spread Health IT innovations that really impact healthcare for good.

One of the goals we had for the conference was to make sure the speakers were as diverse as possible.  At the inaugural EXPO.health event we were able to have no manels (all male panels).  This year we still wanted to strive for no manels, but we also wanted to try and have 50% female speakers.  I think we’re going to fall just short of that goal, but we’re close.  It’s been a great goal for us and I believe it’s produced a better conference for those attending.  Diversity is a valuable thing at a conference and should create environment for all who attend.

What’s been even more amazing has been the community support for this effort and the conference in general.  People like Josie Elias, Malissa O’Rourke Miot, and Sue Schade have gone above and beyond to support our efforts.

Last night we realized that our female healthcare AI speaker wasn’t going to be able to participate.  In order to fill the hole in the panel and to avoid a manel, I reached out to the Health IT social media community with the following tweet:

Let’s just say I’ve been blown away by the response. About 12 hours later (most of which people were asleep) I posted the following:

Since I’m a bit of a data nerd, the original tweet alone has gotten 15,585 impressions and 351 people have engaged with the tweet in 24 hours. Plus, the stream of connections is still going strong. I guess in health IT social media terms you’d say that the tweet went viral. I even suggested that maybe we should hold a Women in healthcare AI event since there were so many amazing things being done by those in healthcare AI.

Now we’re sorting through all the suggestions to see who will be a great fit for EXPO.health and is available to join us in Boston. While this has been very helpful for our event, it’s also been an amazing social discovery when it comes to finding amazing females working in healthcare AI. I think Debra Boyce, MD described it well:

With that in mind, I wanted to share the list of women in healthcare AI that were suggested to me. Hopefully you can all enjoy connecting and following with some really extraordinary people working in healthcare AI.

For now I only included those who had Twitter accounts, but would be open to adding those not on Twitter but on LinkedIn. Also, I included a few companies who had some female AI experts working at their companies. I’m also sure that I missed some, so please let me know if I missed any that I should add. In fact, if you have others that aren’t on the list that you think I should add, let me know in the comments or with @techguy on social media and I’ll update the list.

One other interesting part of this experience is that I was often as interested in following the person who recommended the AI expert as the person they recommended. You can see those generous souls who supported their colleagues here. I’d be remiss if I didn’t also mention the Speaker Database that Rock Health has put together of great female speakers in healthcare.

Needless to say, we’re deeply grateful for the supportive social community for their help. We can’t wait for EXPO.health at the end of the month in Boston. It will be a great event in large part due to the community that values and supports diversity. I look forward to seeing many of you in Boston.

This is when Twitter is at its best!

About the author

John Lynn

John Lynn is the Founder of HealthcareScene.com, a network of leading Healthcare IT resources. The flagship blog, Healthcare IT Today, contains over 13,000 articles with over half of the articles written by John. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 20 million times.

John manages Healthcare IT Central, the leading career Health IT job board. He also organizes the first of its kind conference and community focused on healthcare marketing, Healthcare and IT Marketing Conference, and a healthcare IT conference, EXPO.health, focused on practical healthcare IT innovation. John is an advisor to multiple healthcare IT companies. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can be found on Twitter: @techguy.

2 Comments

  • John, it was so much fun to watch this feed. Maybe this is how all conferences should gather speakers? One for your list is Sita Kapoor, CIO, HealthEC. She started at NASA and is now a self-proclaimed healthcare data scientist. Check out her HIMSS story here: https://www.himss.org/nasa-health-it-meet-data-scientist. Her specialty is working with ACOs, state Medicaid programs and other organizations that need to gather data across disparate sources, conduct deep analytics and apply AI to drive actions. All the best in Boston!

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