A reflection on a year’s worth of writing

A year ago, Steve Myers, Managing Editor of Digital Health Insights emailed me to see if I would be interested in being a contributing writer. He was following up on a connection that I made with Sarah Moors, Staff Writer, through a mutual digital health enthusiasts networking group. When Steve shared that I could write about any number of topics that were timely, fit DHI’s content pillars, and were of interest to me, I was thrilled. This collaboration has led to thirty four articles written over the past year. 

I have always found a way to incorporate writing into my various jobs over the course of my career. It’s been a means to address common questions and create durable resources, tell brand stories, explore topics I am curious about, and elevate important but undercovered topics in healthcare. I find so much joy when I hear from others who have read my articles and learned something new! 

Since September 2024, I carved a niche for myself within the DHI team, and reported on a variety of topics through a women’s health, pediatrics, and health equity lens. 

I featured some pretty incredible changemakers in the space, including Eric Dy, CEO of Bloomlife, who gave an exclusive interview about how Bloomlife went from a D2C home contraction tracker company to a B2B2C company partnering with providers to manage high risk pregnancies remotely in collaboration with nurse oversight. This was a master class in pivoting from a consumer digital health product to an FDA-regulated care platform. Clare Purvis, the founder of WELL for Digital Health shared how she bridged the gap between academia and industry by founding WELL for Digital Health. Jessica Bell Van Der Wall, CEO of Frame Fertility, provided unique insights into how virtual care can expand access to comprehensive family building support and how she’s done it from the ground up. It was very exciting to pull together a list of health tech trailblazers from Inc.’s Female Founder 500, as well as the winners of the ARPA- H women’s health sprint who were granted a portion of $100 million, which just shows that women are actively contributing to the future of healthcare. 

I didn’t shy away from harder conversations — because whether I covered patients solving for unmet medical device needs via open source communities, huge corporate waste while chasing the wrong solution in fertility testing, the federal government disappearing reproductive health sites, at‑home perimenopause hormone tests that lack clinical value, and that mental health care is a missing piece in comprehensive GLP-1 treatment, the same themes keep emerging. Across all of these stories, three truths stand out: health innovation without clinical grounding can do more harm than good, patient experience is too often an afterthought instead of a design principle, and fragmented systems, whether technical, regulatory, or informational, undermine trust and care.

As the topic of AI and healthcare ramped up, so did my exploration of how it relates to women’s health and health equity. My first piece for DHI asked, Are Google AI overviews helping or hindering consumer health education? To demonstrate how quickly the industry is moving, some of my concerns about the health content provided in Google’s AI overview have already been resolved 12 months later! I connected with a nurse midwife who was funded to create an empathetic AI chatbot to transform reproductive health conversations. I examined the underpinnings of AI models with Why we need more women’s health data for AI models. Research has demonstrated that there is gender bias in many datasets supporting LLMs, and therefore, women are building their own health AI tools. 

While AI might be the current prom queen of health tech, I delighted in covering some of the lesser known stories of good work. Our readers learned about how home-based postpartum care could improve health for women and children when built with trust in mind, and that relatively low-tech solutions could improve health outcomes in maternity care deserts in the U.S, especially as new digital biomarkers are developed. One of my favorite stories was, “Sister Gadget” is leveraging health tech to take care of nuns around the world. Sister Pat Pepitone is responsible for the wellbeing of 40-50 nuns, and has equipped them with Apple Watches and Alexas to provide peace of mind and easy access to emergency care services if they need them. These stories are adding to the evidence that remote patient monitoring continues to improve patient satisfaction and health outcomes (and is reimbursable!)

I am both excited about my new adventure and sad to be ending this chapter of my work. However, one of the main lessons of my career has been that relationships may change over time, but the best ones have a way of being durable as well. Sending my sincere gratitude to the team at DHI and I look forward to running into others from CHIME at the next industry event! Until then, go forth and keep up the good work.