WHT Spotlight:
Amy West
Driving Digital Innovation with Empathy
Amy West, Chair of HITLAB’s Women’s Health Tech Initiative (WHTI) and Principal of Advisory Services, is a renowned digital health strategist who translates patient-centered insights into actionable innovation. With 15 years of leadership at Novo Nordisk and a clear focus on closing the women’s health equity gap, Amy’s work ensures that technology isn’t just advanced—it’s accessible, meaningful, and mindful of real human needs.
From Strategic Leader to HITLAB Visionary
Amy’s journey began with a solid educational foundation—she earned an MBA in Marketing from Marymount University and a BA in English from the University of Richmond. Her transition into healthcare began with digital agency pharma account leadership and commercial roles at Wyeth, where she mastered brand launches and CRM strategies for various therapy areas.
In 2009, Amy joined Novo Nordisk, where she became a pioneer in healthcare innovation and transformation. She spearheaded the award-winning Cornerstones4care™ diabetes support platform—one of the industry’s first state-of-the-art digital ecosystems. Built on a sophisticated data infrastructure and powered by AI and ML, the platform curated customized experiences based on individual needs and preferences, capturing real world and patient reported data to enhance segmentation, patient profiles, and real time content generation.
From 2020 to 2024, as Head of U.S. Digital Transformation & Innovation, she established Apis Labs, the first U.S. innovation incubator for Novo Nordisk providing a novel problem-solving framework to identify customer root cause pain points and accelerate rapid testing to validate scalable solutions designed to disrupt the healthcare ecosystem and improve outcomes. The validated solutions supported early R&D discovery, clinical trial protocols and implementation, and commercial interventions across common and rare disease therapeutic areas
In September 2024, Amy took on expanded impact in the digital health space as Principal, Advisory Services and Chair of the Women’s Health Tech Initiative (WHTI) at HITLAB. In this role, she advises global healthcare organizations, startups, and investors on digital transformation strategies. As Chair of WHTI, she has amplified the visibility of women’s health innovation by convening cross-industry leaders, mentoring founders, and curating programs that accelerate the growth of early-stage startups. Under her leadership, the initiative has provided strategic guidance to dozens of innovators, helped catalyze funding opportunities, and built a collaborative ecosystem where women’s health technologies can thrive. By combining advisory expertise with ecosystem building, Amy is helping ensure that women’s health solutions scale beyond pilot stages and deliver real-world impact worldwide.
Accelerating Women’s Health Innovation
Amy’s work centers on making digital tools that patients actually want and can easily use. She brings human-centered design thinking into digital health solutioning, pushing innovators to “become enamored with the problem, not the solution.” In her 2022 HITLAB Innovators Summit keynote, she challenged attendees to change the innovation mindset from the “inside out” to “outside-in”—starting with patient needs first, not flashy tech.
More recently, Amy led discussions on FHIR (a standard for health data interoperability standards) at HITLAB Innovators Summits, underscoring its role in transforming data access and patient-centered care delivery.
Leading with Empathy and Execution
The Future of Women’s Health & Digital Equity
Amy envisions a healthcare ecosystem where digital tools empower everyone, not just the tech-savvy. As Chair of the WHTI, she encourages women’s health innovators to integrate equity in their design from day one. “The future, she believes, is digital—but only if it’s built with equity, empathy, and access at its core”. By championing innovation that begins with real patient needs, Amy West is shaping a healthcare landscape where technology becomes not just smarter, but fairer and more human.
Connect & Learn More
- Connect with Amy on LinkedIn
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