As a 16-year-old girl, I walked into a classroom in 2001. 

I sets down my bulging backpack, full of binders, textbooks, and dried out gel pens. The bell rings it’s familiar timbre and a formidable figure heads to the front of the class. 

“Today, we are talking about how all historical events can be understood by examining political, social, and economic factors.” 

This framework would be used over and over during the year through the use of examining primary documents, secondary sources, and personal accounts to create concise and compelling essays leading up to the AP exam at the end of the year. 

Flash forward 10 years to 2011. 

As a 26-year-old woman, I walked into my first MPH course. The professor discusses Wicked Problems– things like climate change and maternal mortality– global issues that require research into not just population data but various social, political, and economic factors related to the causation of these Wicked Problems, and well as the interdisciplinary thinking to solve them. 

It’s 2017 and as a 32-year-old woman in a blazer with a laptop bag, I walked the halls of a hospital.

I sat down in the Starbucks and waited for a White Coat to join me. We shake hands and I start asking questions about not which technology they want to use for their patients, but the surrounding issues – What’s the real problem? How are you solving this problem now? Why is it inadequate? What have patients said would make it better? How much would a new solution cost? Who’s buy-in do we need to move this forward? 

It may seem unlikely that I moved into digital health from a history background, but some of the best tools I’ve carried with me over the last 20 years are critical thinking skills and the ability to examine a problem from multiple angles. This determines not just what the right path forward is, but how it could be evidence-based, approved, and financed. I love not just the brainstorming but also being in the trenches of creation where I constantly go back to “are we doing the right thing?” based upon user input (social), market forces and decision makers (political), and costs (financial and time.) 

But it’s not enough to just build. A product cannot live in a vacuum, otherwise it’s just a code repository. A product’s life-changing, friction-reducing, problem-solving, happiness-inducing qualities must be shouted from the rooftop. I can’t just stop at creation, I have to communicate value. 

Hindsight is 20/20 and I’m grateful that I understand the connective tissue that ties my professional experiences together. Early critical thinking training led to a unique way of approaching problems that I bring to all of my Well Made Health clients.