30 Healthcare IT Influencers Worth a Follow in 2023

As the chief digital and information officer and senior vice president at Baptist Health in Jacksonville, Fla., Aaron Miri is responsible for building the organization’s IT future. His work focuses on digital strategy, innovation, cybersecurity and integration of technology across the enterprise. Miri also is co-chair of the Health IT Advisory Committee under the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology.

Abner Mason is the founder and CEO of SameSky Health, which uses multimodal outreach to guide its members on their health journeys. His goal is to make healthcare more accessible and equitable for people, no matter their cultural background, language or economic status. Mason served on President George W. Bush’s Presidential Advisory Council on HIV/AIDS. He also served as chief policy adviser and chief secretary to the Governor of Massachusetts and on President Joe Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris’s campaign policy committee. He currently sits on the board of directors of Manifest MedEx and the California Black Health Network. Mason is a member of the United States of Care’s Founders Council and the American Medical Association’s External Equity and Innovation Advisory Group. He is also the founder of Health Tech 4 Medicaid. He tweets about health equity.

As CEO of the National Rural Health Association, Alan Morgan advocates for health equity and access for patients in rural areas. He has worked in health policy development for more than 30 years at the state and federal level. Morgan has been a contributing author for the publications Policy & Politics in Nursing and Health Care, The Handbook of Rural Aging and Rural Populations and Health. Morgan served as a legislative assistant for former U.S. Congressman Dick Nichols of Kansas and as deputy press secretary for former Kansas Governor Mike Hayden.

Dr. Amy Faith Ho is chief of clinical informatics and senior vice president at Integrative Emergency Services as well as an attending emergency physician at Baylor University Medical Center. She is a five-time TEDx speaker and the author of Is Mommy a Doctor or Superhero? Ho has written about medicine for Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, HuffPost, the Chicago Tribune and more. She tweets about healthcare policy and informatics.

Dr. Arlene Chung is the clinical product team lead for consumer health and physician informatician at Google Health, as well as course director of health IT business solutions for Duke University School of Medicine’s Master of Management in Clinical Informatics program. She specializes in internal medicine, pediatrics and clinical informatics and practices for outpatient primary care. Before joining Google, Chung was an associate professor of medicine and pediatrics at the UNC School of Medicine, where she led federally funded research in digital health. She is a founding director of UNC Hospitals’ Clinical Informatics Fellowship program. Chung tweets about artificial intelligence and informatics.

Dr. Bechara Choucair is chief health officer and senior vice president at Kaiser Permanente. He served as the White House Vaccinations Coordinator in 2021 and as commissioner for the Chicago Department of Public Health from 2009 to 2014. Choucair is the author of Precision Community Health: Four Innovations for Well-Being. He tweets about public health and health equity.

In addition to his role as director of health services research at Cedars-Sinai, Dr. Brennan Spiegel is director of the Cedars-Sinai Master’s Degree Program in Health Delivery Science and is the Dorothy and George Gourrich chair in digital health ethics. Spiegel has published medical textbooks, editorials and more than 270 articles in peer-reviewed journals. His team at the Cedars-Sinai Center for Outcomes Research and Education has developed medical virtual reality programs. His work has focused on medical extended reality, a field in which clinicians can use immersive technologies to treat anxiety, depression, pain and more. He tweets about health IT and VR.

Brittany Barreto is the founder and host of the FemTech Focus podcast and website of the same name, both of which focus on amplifying innovation in the female health and wellness space. She is also founder and president of FemHealth Insights, a boutique consulting firm specializing in women’s health innovation. Barreto tweets about femtech and women’s health.

In addition to being a urologist, Dr. Chad Ellimoottil is the medical director of virtual care for the University of Michigan Medical Group. His research agenda is focused on evaluating telehealth programs and policies. Ellimoottil also directs the U-M Telehealth Research Incubator, which studies the impact of telehealth on healthcare costs, quality, access and patient experience. He tweets about virtual care, telehealth policy and health IT.

Dr. Christopher Longhurst is passionate about implementing digital solutions that help improve the patient experience. As the chief medical officer and chief digital officer for UC San Diego Health, he works to improve care delivery and leads the organization’s technology strategy, overseeing initiatives that advance infrastructure across UC San Diego Health and the entire University of California Health system. Longhurst also is associate dean at the UC San Diego School of Medicine and a newborn hospitalist. He tweets about health IT, AI and the electronic health record.

Dr. CT Lin has been the chief medical information officer for the UCHealth system since 2012. He also is a professor of medicine at the University of Colorado School of Medicine. He runs a blog called “The Undiscovered Country,” which focuses on his experience as a CMIO. Lin tweets about health IT and informatics.

Dean Sittig is an expert on informatics and the electronic health record. He is a professor of biomedical informatics at UTHealth Houston’s D. Bradley McWilliams School of Biomedical Informatics and executive director of the Clinical Informatics Research Collaborative, a group of applied clinical informatics researchers committed to improving the understanding of issues related to the design, development, implementation, use and evaluation of all aspects of health IT, with an emphasis on EHRs. He tweets about making EHRs safer for patients and users.

Dr. Dereck Paul is the CEO and co-founder of Glass Health, a platform for AI-assisted diagnosis and clinical decision-making. He co-founded the company with Graham Ramsey due to their shared belief that software could enable doctors to practice medicine as efficiently and effectively as possible. Paul tweets about health equity and AI.

UConn Health chief medical information officer Dr. Dirk Stanley is a board-certified hospitalist, informaticist and workflow designer. Prior to joining UConn Health in 2016, he spent eight years as the CMIO of Cooley Dickinson Hospital. Stanley runs a blog called “DirkMD: CMIO Perspective,” where he discusses informatics and clinical leadership.

Grace Cordovano is a board-certified patient advocate. She founded Enlightening Results in 2010. As CEO, Cordovano consults with healthcare organizations to advocate for cancer patients. She is also co-founder of Unblock Health, a suite of digital tools that streamlines tasks that patients and their families routinely perform. She tweets about health IT and the patient experience.

James Zou is an assistant professor of biomedical data science and the faculty director of AI for Health at Stanford University. He works on making machine learning more reliable, human-compatible and statistically rigorous. Zou is especially interested in applications of ML and AI for human disease and health and has published his research in the journal Nature. He also is an investigator for the Chan Zuckerberg Biohub Network. Zou tweets about AI and ML use cases.

Joy Rios is the founder, CEO and host of the HIT Like a Girl podcast, which amplifies the voices of women in healthcare and health IT. Rios states that she founded the podcast after attending a healthcare conference in 2018 in which, over four days of speeches and panel discussions, 95 percent of the speakers were men. She spent a decade as a health IT consultant. Rios tweets about women in health IT.

Dr. Karinn Glover specializes in psychiatry and mind-body health. She has been an attending psychiatrist at Montefiore Health System for nearly 14 years and is a former board member of the American Psychiatric Association Foundation. Over the course of her medical career, Glover has developed and consulted on wellness programming for employees of color and worked with organizational leadership to address workplace mental health efforts for professionals of all backgrounds. Glover has appeared on podcasts and radio broadcasts and given numerous lectures and presentations on behavioral health and health equity.

In addition to her role as an assistant professor in the Arizona State University School of Life Sciences, Krystal Tsosie is co-founder of the Native BioData Consortium, the first nonprofit research institute led by Indigenous scientists and tribal members in the United States. The consortium is composed of Indigenous geneticists whose goal is to keep biological samples and data from tribal members in their communities. Tsosie is an Indigenous geneticist-bioethicist whose research focuses on Indigenous population genetics and bioethics. Her work has been covered by PBS’ NOVA, The Washington Post, NPR, The New York Times, The Atlantic, Forbes and The Boston Globe. Tsosie serves on the Government and Public Advocacy Committee for the American Society of Human Genetics. She tweets about Indigenous data sovereignty and genomics.

Matt Fisher is general counsel for the virtual care platform Carium, where he ensures the company adheres to healthcare laws and regulations in addition to handling all other legal matters. He hosts the Healthcare de Jure podcast, which focuses on the day’s hottest healthcare issues from a legal perspective. Fisher tweets about HIPAA compliance and digital health.

Michael Archuleta is CIO for Mt. San Rafael Hospital in Trinidad, Colo. He has led the organization’s IT department to improve value-based health care performance, which resulted in the department receiving the Healthcare’s Most Wired Award, now known as the Digital Health Most Wired Award, from the College of Healthcare Information Management Executives from 2015 through 2019, which is given annually to hospitals that have made the most progress in the adoption of health IT. Archuleta is an executive advisory board member for Cylera, Prime Health and Silicon Valley Latino. Archuleta is also a CHIME member and an active speaker within the health IT space. He tweets about health IT and healthcare IT leadership.

Natalia Cineas is senior vice president and chief nurse executive at NYC Health + Hospitals where she plans, oversees and evaluates nurse education and clinical operations and services to ensure the delivery of quality, safe, standardized and cost-effective nursing care to patients. She is also a professor at the Columbia University School of Nursing and sits on the NYC board of directors for the American Heart Association. Cineas was recently named one of 149 Black Healthcare Leaders to Know in 2023 by Becker’s Hospital Review. She tweets about nursing leadership.

Peter Lee leads Microsoft Research across its laboratories around the world as corporate vice president of research and incubations at Microsoft. He also oversees several incubation teams, the largest of which is the company’s healthcare and life sciences program. Before joining Microsoft in 2010, Lee was vice chair of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, where he established a division dedicated to machine learning, data science and computational social science. Lee is also the former head Carnegie Mellon University’s computer science department. Lee speaks and writes widely on technology trends and policies, including AI in healthcare.

Dr. Pilar Ortega is a bilingual (Spanish and English), board-certified emergency medicine physician. She is the vice president of diversity, equity and inclusion for the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education, as well as a clinical associate professor at the University of Illinois College of Medicine. Her work emphasizes cross-linguistic communication that centers patients. She is an advocate of mentorship and Hispanic/Latinx representation in medicine. Ortega tweets about health equity.

As the chief medical informatics officer and vice president for UPMC, Dr. Salim Saiyed leads clinical technology implementation as well as initiatives around digital health, informatics, data governance and data analytics with a focus on improving patient and clinician experiences. Saiyed also leads digital transformation efforts involving telehealth initiatives. He is a member of the American Medical Informatics Association and the American Telemedicine Association and president of the Pennsylvania chapter of the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society. He is board certified in clinical informatics and family medicine. Saiyed tweets about telehealth and health IT.

Sara Vaezy is the chief strategy and digital officer for Providence where she leads the ongoing development and evolution of Providence’s integrated strategic and financial plan. She is also on the board of directors for the National Committee for Quality Assurance, a nonprofit organization that works to improve healthcare quality through the administration of evidence-based standards, measures, programs and accreditation. In addition to being a healthcare executive, Vaezy is also involved in Yeah Boy Sauce, a hand-crafted, small batch hot sauce company. She tweets about health IT and digital health.

Dr. Sonia Gupta is the chief medical officer of enterprise imaging for Optum, chief medical officer for Change Healthcare and a practicing abdominal radiologist. She has advised and consulted for Fortune 500 companies, private equity and venture capital funds, and AI startups. Gupta is a member of the Forbes Business Council and is a frequent keynote speaker. She tweets about AI, healthcare technology and startups.

Dr. Stella Safo is the founder and CEO of Just Equity for Health, a company that aims to reimagine how organizations deliver equitable care in medicine. Through advocacy, education and care model design, Just Equity for Health targets the realities of racism and sexism that harm Black people and people of color, healthcare practitioners and communities. Safo is a board-certified HIV primary care physician with experience in care model design for health systems and industry. She is committed to equitable care delivery and has been active in local and national initiatives to combat racism and sexism within healthcare.

Dr. Tania Elliott is the chief medical officer of virtual care and vice president of clinical and network services at Ascension, a nonprofit health system. She advances adoption of virtual visits and remote patient monitoring across the care continuum. Elliott is an expert in telemedicine and digital health, leveraging connected care technologies to bring care to patients wherever they are. She is also a clinical instructor at NYU Langone Health and chairs the Telehealth and Technology Task Force at the American College of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. She’s been featured on several TV talk shows and news programs. Elliott tweets about health IT, telehealth and patient care.

Hosted by Jessica DaMassa, the WTF Health podcast focuses on “what’s the future” of healthcare. It spotlights the health tech startups, venture capital investors, innovators and accelerators pushing cutting-edge technology and disruptive solutions into healthcare. It also examines the insurance companies, pharmaceutical companies and hospital systems working to shepherd these new ideas into the industry.