Holly Urban - Episode 36

In this episode, part of a special collaboration between ACM ByteCast and the American Medical Informatics Association (AMIA)’s For Your Informatics podcast, hosts Sabrina Hsueh and Sullafa Kadura welcome Holly Urban, a pediatrician and clinical informaticist. After working for several years as a practicing pediatrician, Holly transitioned to working in product management roles for Healthcare IT vendors, including product leadership roles at McKesson and Hearst Health. Most recently, Holly was Chief Medical Informatics Officer (CMIO) at Oracle Cerner before recently starting a new role as VP of Clinical Product Design at CliniComp.

Holly describes how she became interested in medical informatics, product design, and management and how that inspired her to serve in an ambassador role between clinical and technical teams. She talks about transitioning from her role as CMIO at Oracle Cerner where she focused on software implementation and deployment to designing a new electronic health record (EHR) system at CliniComp. She stresses the importance of data literacy to analyze the reams of data generated by EHR and the promise of AI and ML in measuring effectiveness of interventions such as medical procedures and medications—as well as the issue of bias with these tools. Lastly, Holly shares valuable advice for professionals who are thinking about switching job roles.