I’d like to extend a warm welcome to Grace Potma, who will be taking up the role of Director of Product for the OpenMRS Community. In this role, she’ll collaborate with squads and our technical/product committees, community members and implementers on the ground to understand user needs, define priorities, ensure that our roadmap reflects these priorities, and move these from concept to realization through a defined technical process.
Grace comes to us from Thrive Health, a healthcare software startup in Canada where she was the Director of Product Management and Clinical Informatics. Grace is not only a Product Manager, but a Registered Nurse with a specialty in Emergency Nursing and a Masters in Business Administration. She says, “I loved the detective work and fast-pace of Critical Care, but I left bedside care to study business because I wanted to understand and influence the systemic problems I was seeing.”
At Thrive Health, she helped build highly configurable software to help patients explain their stories electronically, in a way that converted into clinician-friendly language and made it easy for staff to identify at-risk patients early. This meant heavily using HL7 FHIR, Decision Support, clinical terminologies, and a building many configuration UIs for rapid site-by-site customization. Among her favorite experiences were (1) seeing Thrive’s products help a whole healthcare system automatically identify vulnerable patients many months ahead of surgeries instead of just days before, and (2) designing and building COVID apps for governments and citizens across Canada that reached over 4 million people within weeks of launching. Grace brings valuable experience building up a strong team over the years. Grace shared: “The model was very collaborative, and clinical, product, design, and technical people all worked together closely.”
We’re excited to have Grace join our community!
