The Week of Women in Healthcare

#XXinHealthWeek
Twitter fans – particularly #HITchicks – may have come across the hashtag above this week as part of the larger XX in Health Week, an initiative of Rock Health to connect and empower female visionaries to drive change in healthcare. I’m all for driving change, and know from personal experience that women, whether in the home or workplace, tend to be masters of multitasking, putting out small fires as needed, and soothing bruised egos and fragile psyches. We seem well suited to the task of driving change, but not surprisingly, are not well positioned to do so.

According to a slide deck put together for the XX in Health Week, women make up just 14% of healthcare companies’ BODs, and 0% of Fortune 500 healthcare company CEOs.  The statistics are a bit more hopeful when looking strictly at hospitals, according to the recent “Women in the Hospital C-Suite” report from Billian’s HealthDATA:

I’m not sure when we’ll get to female leadership numbers that are acceptable, or who will make that call. It will be nice when, as mentioned in the slide deck, we recognize leaders not by their gender but by their ability to lead.

Health 2.0
Atlanta has its own Health 2.0 movement – a meetup group focused on startups in healthcare IT that is finally getting some momentum. Numbers for female leadership are good. One of three companies that pitched at the most recent event was led by a woman. Brandi March of NovitaCare – a mobile solution that helps patients and the family members who serve as their caregivers manage and coordinate care in one central location – started the company after taking on the role of caregiver for her ailing mother. She described the task of obtaining and organizing her mother’s records, sharing news with other family members, trying to stay organized and trying to make sure six or seven different providers were all on the same page as a “nightmare.” And so NovitaCare was born.

All in all it’s been a good week for women in healthcare. It will be interesting to see if the statistics mentioned above have changed by this time next year. I feel like there are plenty of unsung female visionaries driving healthcare change RIGHT NOW. Please share the story of someone you know via the comments below.