This Is What Happens When the Right Room Exists

By Madeline DuPlessis, SVP, Enterprise Sales

Here’s the number that should bother every healthcare leader reading this: women make up more than two-thirds of the healthcare workforce and hold less than 30% of C-suite seats.

That is not a pipeline problem. The entry point is not the issue. The issue is what happens on the way up, and it happens quietly, one missed promotion at a time, until you look up and wonder where everyone went.

There are conferences. There are panels. There are plenty of spaces designed to celebrate women in healthcare and AI. What has been harder to find is something more specific, a cross-sector room and the kind of conversation that only happens when everyone in it has agreed to be honest.

That is what we built with In the Round: Women at the Rodeo in Nashville. And it is what we intend to keep building.

Different Verses, Same Song

The evening’s theme wasn’t just a title. It was the premise.

Every woman in that room, leaders from health systems, payers, academic medicine, health tech startups, and VC, is navigating the same AI moment in healthcare. But what that moment looks like depends entirely on where you’re sitting. A Chief Medical AI Officer and a payer-side VP and a health tech founder are all grappling with the same wave, but the decisions they’re facing, the resistance they’re feeling, and the questions keeping them up at night are completely different.

Most events sort people by sector, by title, by company size. You end up in a room with people who already see the world the way you do.

This wasn’t that. It was a clinical AI officer and a surgical device VP and a healthcare VC and an employer health COO in the same room, talking honestly. Not the polished version of what their organizations are doing with AI, but the real one. The value of that cross-sector format is hard to replicate anywhere else, and that is exactly why we designed it this way.

The Harder Conversation

Women are twice as likely as men to see their reputation take a hit when their AI use is noticed at work. Think about what that means. At the exact moment when fluency with AI is becoming a prerequisite for leadership, using it costs women something it doesn’t cost men.

Healthcare is the industry that depends most on getting AI right. Women are the workforce running it. Those two facts are on a collision course, and that collision rarely gets the honest conversation it deserves.

This evening was built for that conversation. We anchored the fireside chat with three leaders who brought the kind of candor that made the whole room lean in and, more importantly, made the whole room open up: Cristina Ingram, Executive Director of Enterprise Analytics at Vanderbilt University Medical Center; Nina Kottler, MD, MS, FSIIM, FAIM, Chief Medical AI Officer at Mosaic Clinical Technologies; and Sarah Washabaugh, Vice President of IT Strategy and Transformation at Humana. That candor is not something you can manufacture. It has to be earned, and they earned it. Every woman who showed up and stayed in the conversation was the reason it worked.

What surfaced throughout the evening was specific and practical and, frankly, worth a blog post of its own. Nobody was asking for a mentorship program. The conversation kept coming back to access. To real information shared between people who have done the thing. To the difference between being given a seat and earning one, and what it takes to close that gap from the inside.

Why Optura Builds These Rooms

At Optura, we work on the problem of AI delivering in healthcare, not just being deployed, but delivering measurable value. What we’ve learned is that the hardest part is never the technology. It’s getting the right people aligned, making real decisions together, and building the organizational trust to act on what AI surfaces.

The women in that room are the ones making those decisions. They are the C-suite, the clinical leadership, the investors, the operators. The future of healthcare AI runs through them.

And yet the industry has been slow to bring them together across sectors for a conversation that isn’t built around a stage. Not as a diversity initiative, but as a strategic necessity.

That is what this evening was. Not a celebration of how far we’ve come, but an honest look at how far we have to go and a room full of people willing to do something about it.

There’s too much momentum here to let it stop at one night.

In the Round is an Optura community for senior leaders in healthcare and AI. Learn more at optura.ai/intheround.