Shawna provides leadership and guidance to the Foundation on its nursing and healthcare initiatives.
A nurse economist, health tech catalyst, and the builder of the global EntrepreNURSE movement, Shawna aims to better position nurses in our health innovation agendas as discovery engines, solution designers, and scale agents. Several years ago, she initiated a global conversation highlighting the rarity of nurses in boardrooms, product design, innovation teams, policy development, tech conferences, and health media. She’s on a mission to change that.
As the host of the SEE YOU NOW podcast, Shawna highlights the innovative and human-centered solutions driven by nurses addressing today’s most challenging healthcare problems. She’s also the managing director of the NextMed.Health conference working with the pioneers in the thick of integrating robotics, 3D printing, drones, AI, blended reality, voice recognition, digital humans, big data and sensors into our health solutions and lifestyles to improve health, access, experience and outcomes.
Her various roles have taken her across the world and given her an unusually broad understanding of health systems and a population’s health outcomes and the impact technology and policy have on these dimensions. Shawna understands instinctively the need to work cross-sector and upstream to improve health outcomes and has done so throughout her career by working with city planners, musicians, arts organizations, chefs, farmers, schools, home builders, philanthropists, investors, inventors, rebels, legends, and anyone with a conviction to improve health and our shared human experience.
Shawna is an active member of the Texas Medical Reserves and serves as an advisor to a variety of local, national, and global initiatives including JLabs Quick Fire Challenge, Smith+Nephew, Sharecare, End Well Project, SXSW Pitch Competition, and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) International Advisory Board.
In 2021, Shawna was honored as a Top 50 in Digital Health which recognizes exceptional digital health leaders who are making healthcare massively better for all.