Ep 52: Meredith Harper: “We Get Nowhere By Ourselves”

Diva Tech Talk Podcast

Diva Tech Talk interviewed Meredith Harper, Chief Privacy and Security Officer for Henry Ford Health Systems (www.hfhs.org)

With strong science and math aptitudes, Meredith began her tech journey in 2nd/3rd grades and then “I ended up being bussed, with kids all over the city of Detroit, to a middle school for gifted children.” Meredith graduated high school in the top 3% of the Detroit Public School System, and started college at Hampton University, in Virginia. At the end of her freshman year, she lost her father. “So, I moved back home to Michigan,” where she was awarded a scholarship to attend the University of Detroit, Mercy (https://www.udmercy.edu/). In junior year, she switched from architecture to a computer science program.

Meredith’s first industry job was on the Help Desk for Budco (https://www.dialog-direct.com ) supporting Ford Motor Co. (www.ford.com) dealerships. She then moved to Ann Arbor, Michigan as a data analyst for The Medstat Group (www.medstatonline.com), and “even in the early ‘90’s, we were collecting millions of rolls of data,” Meredith said. She widely traveled to support and install paid health claims systems at many client sites, nationwide. “That’s when I realized I wasn’t just a technical person. I liked to talk to people; I liked to sell things.”

“I knew absolutely nothing about healthcare,” Meredith said. “So, I ended up going back to school, because I wanted to get insight into the industry.” While working full-time, Meredith received a master's’ degree in health care administration at the University of Detroit, Mercy, and credits the person she calls her personal “angel investor,” Sister Mary Kelly there, for pragmatically supporting her early journey. Referring to Sister Mary, Meredith says: “We need to understand, we don’t get where we are, by ourselves.”

She moved on as an analysts and junior consultant at Johnson and Johnson (https://www.jnj.com) offering software to support operating room cost-savings. She worked as a project manager/team leader at the Central Georgia Medical System (https://www.navicenthealth.org/). There, Meredith benefited from being mentored by director of IT, Kyle Johnson, now a CIO. “She taught me a whole lot about leading teams --- how you traverse this environment primarily made up of men.”

As a project manager at Children’s Medical Center, in Dayton Ohio, (https://www.childrensdayton.org), “we moved to the next regulatory ‘thing’ which was HIPAA (the Health Information Portability and Accountability Act).” She led the HIPAA gap analysis for all health systems IT and operational areas. “I had to sit down and read the entire 1100-page document to understand exactly what the implications were going to be.” Moving back to Michigan, she joined Health Alliance Plan (www.hap.org) to establish their HIPAA plan. “From that point forward, 2002, I haven’t been able to get away from HIPAA since,” she laughed.

Henry Ford Health Systems, who owns HAP, asked Meredith, in 2003, to become their first Chief Privacy Officer. Originally embedded in the compliance department, separate from IT, “I became the first Privacy and Security Officer because we felt that those two areas needed to be married. We needed to be governed by the same rules. We needed to have the same leader.” One of the personal benefits to Meredith is that she began to report directly to Henry Ford’s first female CIO: MaryAlice Annecharico (Diva Tech Talk Episode 24). “We have been able to build a team of 53 amazing people, who are very passionate about the work that we do. Data is king around here. The more we can control access to data, the more we can control our risk.” Meredith also acknowledged “I’m having a ball because I am one of the few women in the country who do it, at this level!”

Meredith’s personal strengths are math/science aptitude combined with strong communication skills; propensity to take calculated risks; flexibility; intellectual curiosity; emotional intelligence; and coalition-building. Ever the eager student, Meredith is enrolled in a post-university masters of jurisprudence in health law at Loyola University Chicago School of law, a prerequisite for her doctorate level degree that she plans on entering, next. This doctoral program offers students the same mass of knowledge as offered to a would-be attorney. She intends to take her doctorate and teach on the university level. “So, I get that legal spin without having to take the bar exam.”

As an African-American woman, in a male-dominated field, Meredith said “I think it’s more challenging for other folks than it has been for me. They have to get used to the idea of women being at the table. I have chosen to take those opportunities as learning experiences for the other individual ---- maybe they have just not had an experience with a woman leader, in the way they need to. And maybe it’s my job to teach them that.”

Meredith recommends that women aspiring to achieve tech leadership role “Recognize that you will fail. Spin that failure into a ‘life lesson’ you can use, moving forward. Learn from it; move on to the next thing.” Above all, she says: “Know that you can do this.”

Giving back to her community, Meredith is active in MCWT (www.mcwt.org) and with both her former high school and grade school, working with individual girls to “show them they can begin to be what they want to be.” In addition to her busy agenda at HFHS, she also chairs the Michigan Healthcare Cybersecurity Council; is active in HIMSS (the Health Information Management & Systems Society); and is a faculty member for the security boot camp fielded all over the country by Clearwater Compliance LLC. She credits her husband and family for helping her achieve balance, and retain energy. “I lean on them a lot.”

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