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Stuart Garfield
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
2010 Women to Watch
Humedica's A.G. Breitenstein takes hands-on approach to healthcare IT
By Jim Schakenbach, Special to Mass High Tech
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A.G. Breitenstein
Co-founder, VP and GM of Provider Markets, Humedica Inc.
Education: Bachelor’s degree, history, Yale University; Master’s degree, health policy and management, Harvard School of Public Health; Juris doctorate, University of Connecticut
Noteworthy: She is co-founder of three health care IT companies — Humedica, the Institute for Health Metrics and PrivaSource — and the founding director of the Health Law Institute, part of a nonprofit organization working for people with HIV/AIDS and at-risk children. Breitenstein was the primary drafter of the Massachusetts Act to Protect the Privacy of Medical Records and has been an expert resource regarding health data privacy. She teaches ethics at the Harvard School of Public Health. At Humedica, she helps design data-analytic tools that improve patient care and safety and the operational performance of health-care organizations.
On getting into the business
“I’m definitely the accidental capitalist, the accidental technologist. I started as an attorney working with homeless kids on the street. It was really intense — I get personally invested in people. It got me interested in health care, thinking we should be using information to make health care better and cheaper, especially for people who are underserved.”
Issues facing health care
“I hear people talking about genomic medicine and curing cancer with a sexy drug, but the most dangerous thing about walking into a hospital is walking into a hospital. Most people with cancer don’t die of cancer, they die of pneumonia or an infection or something else. We need to make health care itself better and safer.”
What she’s most proud of
“The people I work with. It’s one thing to accomplish something, it’s another to find the right people with whom to accomplish that thing with. I feel the team we’ve assembled around us (at Humedica) are just extraordinary people. It’s the people I’m proudest of.”
What she likes to play with in her spare time
“This is so geeky, but I just bought one of those things you can download movies off the Internet with and play on TV, which is great, because I’m a lazy sod.”
The best job
“Sailing instructor when I was a kid. After college I had the chance to join an all-women sailing crew in a race around the world, but I had to go to law school instead, for financial reasons. Sailing is what I’d be doing if I weren’t doing this.”
Thoughts on Breitenstein, from Michael Weintraub, president and CEO of Humedica
On work ethics: “She is the absolute definition of an entrepreneur. A.G. works harder than anyone, and not just at the visionary level, but at the building and implementation levels too.”
On vision: “A.G.’s got real passion. She spent the last decade talking to anyone and everyone who had issues or problems with health care and turned it into a vision for a business.”
On smarts: “Although A.G. is a recovering attorney, she is off-the-grid smart and practical on many levels, thinking up companies, helping draft medical information privacy laws. A number of VCs said, ‘You’ve just got to meet her.’ ”
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