ABOUT VANESSA
Award-winning healthcare leader and author Vanessa Guzman MS, ME founded SmartRise Health to help healthcare organizations assess complex operational problems and devise strategic, quality improvement, and training initiatives to optimize outcomes and satisfaction among employees, partners, and patients.
Vanessa leverages her years of experience as a systems engineer and quality improvement executive in a multi-billion dollar health system to make abstract challenges concrete, identifying inputs impacting progress and actionable plans to move forward.
Over the years, Vanessa has helped her employers and clients earn millions of dollars in revenue through initiatives ranging from creating a training program for 3,000 healthcare providers to meet Medicare quality metrics to interventions focused on a set of potentially preventable hospital admissions. She offers both a practical knowledge and a set of custom analytic tools that help healthcare providers, insurers, and manufacturers analyze, design, and execute.
Vanessa is passionate about the healthcare sector because it is a helping profession and is committed to working with organizations to recognize and invest in their most valuable asset: human capital. As a part of her suite of services, Vanessa provides individual and group coaching to seasoned professionals and emerging leaders alike, to empower individuals to be better, do better, and create change.
Vanessa graduated from Columbia University’s Fu Foundation School of Engineering and Applied Science with a BS and MS in Biomedical Engineering, specializing in Diagnostic Imaging. She is also certified in Quality Engineering and Quality Management and Organizational Excellence by the American Society for Quality. For her outstanding contributions, she has been awarded the 2018 Becker’s Hospital Review “Rising Stars Under 40” and 2017 Modern Healthcare’s “Up and Comers” Awards.
Vanessa is also a certified life coach and passionate mentor with the Bowery Mission’s Mont Lawn City Camp Leadership Academy. Click below to access Vanessa’s CV and Biography:
AWARDS
ABOUT RUTH
Ruth is passionate about delivering information technology that adds value and improves care by putting patients in the driver's seat with ownership and agency over their medical information and outcomes.
In pursuit of that passion, Ruth has worked with leading Academic Medical Centers to innovate and lead change by implementing EMR systems, enabling interoperability, and supporting initiatives to promote better care of individuals, better health for populations, and lower costs.
Before joining SmartRise Health, Ruth was with Montefiore Medical Center for ten years. As the Director of Information Technology Projects and Operations for Montefiore affiliate White Plains Hospital, she created a Project Management Office, led a team of project managers, and managed a portfolio of more than 50 projects, including telehealth initiatives, remote patient monitoring, SMS texting and deployment of Epic. Prior to Montefiore, Ruth worked at NYU Langone Medical Center and Yale-New Haven Hospital on Epic implementations and other enterprise-wide projects.
During personal time, Ruth enjoys being outdoors – hiking and rock-climbing, gardening, and composting. She volunteers for Girls on the Run to promote girl empowerment, Essential Earth Farm, an urban farm in Connecticut, and at Portchester’s Carver Center’s serving food for “Dinner at Noon.”
ABOUT JOE
Joe brings close to 10 years of experience in customer-facing healthcare roles, helping to bring innovative solutions to different market stakeholders.
Joe has worked in global health roles in Uganda to address maternal & child health, EMR implementations for critical access hospitals, business development in a health economics and outcomes research consulting firm, and partnerships for SDoH referral companies. Joe has secured complex, enterprise-wide agreements with some of the nation’s largest health systems, health plans, pharmaceutical companies, and government agencies. Joe is passionate about ensuring equitable access to care and addressing whole person care.