WoW Woman in Health Tech I Elise Mortensen, Head of Growth at HTD Health
Elise Mortensen is the Head of Growth at HTD Health.
Elise brings a unique perspective to digital health, combining design and social science theory to inform product strategy. After receiving dual undergraduate degrees from Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), Elise began her career researching and writing thought leadership content at a business-focused media startup. She went on to work in a digital product capacity, leading user experience research at Thinx, Inc. (since acquired by Kimberly Clark). In her current role at HTD Health, Elise oversees brand, marketing, sales, and partnership workstreams, working closely with new healthcare clients to design consulting and technology delivery engagements based on company and user needs. She specializes in user experience, patient behavior change, gamification, and omnichannel care experiences.
Tell us a bit about your background and your projects so far.
A major thread in my career has been an interest in how design can help us understand and solve social, environmental, and health challenges. I studied social science and design in the Dual Degree Program at Brown University and the Rhode Island School of Design through which I gained a lot of hands-on experience using qualitative and quantitative research methods plus design thinking and visual art to tease apart complex sociological phenomena.
After my undergraduate degrees, I began researching and writing thought leadership on behalf of companies at Quartz, a digital media publication serving a global business audience. My digital product exposure at Quartz led me to User Experience Research, a field that drew on much of my research skill set with a new lens focused on how humans understand and interact with digital products and technology.
I moved on to lead UX Research at Thinx, a women’s health consumer product company (since acquired by Kimberly Clark), which opened me up to the exciting world of digital women’s health solutions, or “femtech”. From a brand and marketing perspective, Thinx really led a movement toward more open dialogue around periods and pelvic floor health, which historically had been glazed over by campaigns of women dancing in fields of flowers wearing white skinny jeans. Much of the UX work there involved understanding how people with periods understood their own bodies and how cultural and social factors influenced their choice of products. While fascinating work, the time at Thinx really left me craving more direct influence on the way that people—and women specifically—understand and navigate their health.
I joined HTD Health in 2016 to build our thought leadership practice and expand UX research for client projects. In the years since, I have helped build out HTD’s design thinking and UX research offerings and have taken on a new role as Head of Growth in which I oversee our marketing, business development, and partnerships functions. I’ve had the pleasure of working on countless client projects to help healthcare business stakeholders understand their users and leverage design thinking to plan and implement more empathetic and human-centered digital products.
How did you get into this industry? Has it been an easy industry to get into or have you had many challenges?
Without an educational background focused on healthcare policy, there was certainly a learning curve entering this sector. The maze of healthcare processes, regulations, and incentives is quite opaque in the United States, which I think is why there is such a demand from patients for new solutions that make care more accessible and transparent. I was lucky enough to have a really supportive team here at HTD as well as some incredibly generous mentors who helped me learn the ropes of the healthcare sector.
That being said, I’ve learned that many of the design best practices from other sectors still apply within healthcare: In my experience, it’s all about deeply understanding the people involved. In-depth user research can help us build empathy and understanding with the people using healthcare technology, whether patients, clinicians, or business stakeholders. This means that instead of cluttering the ecosystem with new layers of technology that further separate patients from caregivers, we are instead using digital technology to strengthen this relationship and remove barriers to care. At the end of the day, most people working in healthcare are driven by a desire to help patients and improve the quality of care, which makes it all the more jarring to experience how profoundly short our industry can fall in the actual daily experience of care. It’s been incredibly rewarding to see how our client solutions have increased access to important health information, care navigation, and patient support across diverse patient populations and condition areas.
What are your biggest achievements to date?
I wouldn’t say that any of these are my accomplishments alone, but I’m really proud of HTD Health’s evolution since I joined. We were one of the first technology companies focused on the virtual care space and how to design and build digital experiences that help patients access more timely, high-quality care. The products we’ve built for clients are now in use by many millions of patients across condition areas.
I’ve worked with our SMEs to develop a healthcare technology consulting practice that allows HTD to support clients further upstream and share learnings from nearly a decade of healthcare software design and development. This has helped us expand our relationships with enterprise care delivery organizations who are eager to leverage digital solutions to increase patient acquisition, engagement, satisfaction, and efficiency in care delivery.
I conceived of and led the creation of our Partnership program, which has allowed us to collaborate with top SaaS solutions in the digital health ecosystem including Redox, Ribbon, Healthie, and Awell and ensure that clients have a clear understanding of build vs. buy decision making when bringing new products to market. This program has also deepened our integration capabilities, providing the team with hands-on experience integrating with most of the most commonly used third-party solutions in healthcare.
Since launching HTD’s thought leadership efforts in my first year at HTD, our Insights team has published dozens of in-depth content pieces covering industry topics such as patient behavior change, the omnichannel patient experience, digital therapeutics, age tech innovation, virtual behavioral health, cultural competence in care delivery, SMART on FHIR and many others.
What are the projects you are currently working on?
Late last year I led a rebranding effort at HTD to update our visual identity and messaging to better reflect our range of services and client segments of focus. This was a major effort from the internal brand design team led by Joanna Kotas in collaboration with the Marketing and People Operations teams. The resulting brand has unlocked a lot of new marketing initiatives and traction with our target audiences, which have been a big focus area this year for our Marketing team led by Monika Klimczak.
Over the last six months, I’ve also been working with our team to roll out two new practices. The first is a Software as Medical Device practice led by Weronika Michaluk which extends our offerings to include owning the entire design, development, and documentation process for FDA-regulated software. We’re really bullish on next-generation devices transforming care delivery. Just as the new generation of hardware devices in the mid-2000s paved the way for an entirely new market of services—imagine Uber without smartphones—we see a new generation of care services emerging as diagnostics and devices become cheaper, more mobile, and more accurate. Innovation in this space has the potential to totally transform healthcare, especially in key areas like remote patient monitoring and care for older patients aging in place.
The second is an Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Practice led by Erkin Ötleş. There’s been a ton of buzz about AI this year, but we’ve been seeing how some of the tech sector solutions fall short in healthcare because they lack the context of healthcare data infrastructure and the high-risk nature of rolling out advanced models in patient care settings. We want to bring our deep domain knowledge of healthcare technology infrastructure and clinical operations to help clients design more thoughtful, safe, and effective applications of AI.
Is the #WomenInTech movement important to you and if yes, why?
I am definitely passionate about increasing the representation of women in tech at all levels. As I described above, the best technology solutions are those that are designed with deep empathy and understanding for the people who will use them. If the industry does not accurately reflect the population of technology users, solutions will fall short. This is true across all dimensions of identity.
There is no area of technology where this rings more true than healthcare, which has deep roots in patriarchal systems of power. The entire women’s health movement of recent years has been borne out of staggering inequality in medical research, education, treatment, and investment. There are so many different stats that paint this picture, but a few that have always stuck with me:
About 65% of healthcare employees are women, but they make up only 33% of senior executives and 13% of CEOs.
In 2020, the US maternal mortality rate was 24 per 100,000 births—three times the rate of other high-income countries. This staggering statistic is twice as high for Black women in the United States, signaling the urgent need for an intersectional view of representation at all levels of the healthcare system.
A New York Times article last year about medical gaslighting showed that women—especially women of color—face “longer waits to be diagnosed with cancer and heart disease, are treated less aggressively for traumatic brain injury, and are less likely to be offered pain medications.”
It wasn’t until the 1990s that Congress mandated women’s inclusion in clinical trials for new drug treatments. There have been many high-profile examples of medications—such as Ambien—causing adverse effects in women after poor representation in trials. Only in 2016 was an additional policy implemented requiring researchers to report on the relevance of the sex variable in the analysis.
I think it’s encouraging to see how much momentum has been gained by solutions geared specifically or disproportionately to women and nonbinary people in recent years. The “femtech” movement (and publications like Women of Wearables!) have brought attention and investment dollars to digitally-enabled care solutions that seek to close the gender gap and meet a long-underserved segment of the population.
Eventually, I hope we can do away with the notion of “women’s health” altogether and acknowledge that women make up half of all patients (and make 80% of healthcare decisions) and all care delivery must be based on a deep understanding of needs unique to women. We have a long way to go, but I’m heartened to see some incredible networks of women patients, founders, product builders, and investors calling for improvement in the industry.
What will be the key trends in your industry in the next five years and where do you see them heading?
All of us as consumers have constantly evolving expectations when it comes to our products and experiences. Consumer tech has set a high bar—we expect easy, transparent, and even delightful technology experiences. It’s no surprise that we bring these same expectations to healthcare. If I can open an investment account or book a family vacation in 20 minutes on my smartphone, why can’t I find a quick answer to a health question or get clarity on coverage from my insurance plan? Healthcare will experience consistent pressure from patients, rewarding those organizations that prioritize the patient experience and invest in thoughtful technology that makes navigating care easier without sacrificing quality and human connection.
What is the most important piece of advice you could give to anyone who wants to start a career in this industry?
It seems to me that there’s an interesting tension in healthcare success stories between boldness and humility: We need big, innovative ideas and passionate people who are willing to try over and over again to solve problems that plague the US system. However, I’ve seen a lot of entrepreneurs enter healthcare a bit blindly, convinced that they’ve cracked the code to a complex challenge only to uncover a web of regulatory limitations, misaligned business incentives, and patient social and environmental realities that cause ideas to stall. It’s important to be resilient while also being open to learning and listen—especially to patients and care providers who’ve spent their lives navigating care delivery firsthand.
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This interview was conducted by Marija Butkovic, Digital Marketing and PR strategist, founder, and CEO of Women of Wearables. She regularly writes and speaks on topics of wearable tech, fashion tech, IoT, entrepreneurship, and diversity. Follow Marija on Twitter @MarijaButkovic and read her stories for Forbes here.