Anne Baskakova is a digital health product leader and strategic advisor who helps health tech scale-ups (Series C+) and hospital systems turn product vision into scalable execution. She specializes in aligning digital health strategies with business objectives, optimizing product operations, and implementing technology solutions that drive patient engagement and revenue growth.
With over 15 years of experience, Anne has led high-impact health consumer digital portfolios at Teladoc Health, Memorial Sloan Kettering, and NYU Langone. Prior to finding her calling in healthcare, she had an established career in public relations. Anne ran several national and international PR campaigns for global companies like AMD, Nokia, and Yahoo under the umbrellas of Ogilvy PR and Edelman.
In our conversation, Anne talks about her journey breaking into tech and her goal of inspiring other women to reach their full potential. She also discusses how she’s balanced innovation with compliance while working in the digital health space, as well as the importance of empathy when building solutions for health consumers.
The first challenge is not going to surprise anyone — it was the infamous imposter syndrome. I started my career in public relations, and my first client was Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), the processor and graphics company. As I was adapting their press releases to the Russian market, I realized, for the first time, that it wasn’t all that scary. That accelerated further when I started working in the healthcare industry within surgical operations. I took on a project related to the adoption of the patient portal and overshot the goal by 200-something percent. I was like, “Oh, I can really do this!”
From this experience, I saw all the potential technology had, which fueled my enthusiasm further. I knew I had good problem-solving skills, but my big Eureka moment came when I got accepted into the Brigham and Women’s/MIT Labs Hackathon. I led a team of 10 people to build an intuitive patient safety application that ended up being implemented in the hospital later. I realized that even the most talented engineers sometimes need help organizing, and the best technology solution comes from diverse perspectives.
Because I didn’t know how the tech worked, I was unencumbered. I could ask “silly” questions and think outside of the box. In the end, I helped pull all the disparate thoughts into a coherent product in less than 48 hours. I realized two things: that tech has enormous potential in the healthcare space, and that my ability to bring provider, patient, and business perspectives could offer a lot of value.
The second challenge when transitioning to tech was convincing hiring managers of that. I took tech-adjacent roles and transitioned from operations and process improvement to technology implementations and, eventually, product development. Through these experiences, I was able to develop the right set of skills and framework that today allows me to walk into an unfamiliar situation and quickly make sense of it.
First, technology is just a subject, and one can learn it. I recommend a book called How Women Rise by Sally Helgesen and Marshall Goldsmith. They talk about 12 habits or behaviors that women generally do to hinder themselves in their careers, and one of them is overvaluing expertise. We do it all the time. We’re not going after the opportunities that are available to us or could be beneficial because we are afraid we don’t know enough to do it.
Also, when people say technology, a lot of the time, they think, “Oh my gosh, I have to know how to code.” You don’t. Technology means very different things. There are plenty of career tracks that require zero or minimal technical backgrounds, such as project management, marketing, comms, design, product, strategy, and more. Women should not limit themselves. Figure out what skills you have and what’s complementary to the tech company, and then off you go.
Yes, I believe that sharing your past mistakes makes you more approachable and trusted as a leader. On the subject of overcoming your mental trap around lack of knowledge, I often tell the story of my first purely technical experience. It was a contract with the health system in New York. The goal was to build out a comprehensive solution to help a very sensitive patient population. It had three big components: a cloud infrastructure, which was the first of its time in the area, a very strong cybersecurity setup, and it needed a delightful partner and patient experience.
I knew nothing about any of those topics except for the patient experience. On day one of my engagement, I was told that a person leading it previously, who had 20 years more experience than me, resigned because, and I quote, “It was too hard.” I was completely terrified and could barely understand the emails I was receiving. It was all tech jargon and I didn’t know how I could even direct teams if I didn’t know what they were talking about.
But again, it’s just language. I learned the terms by favoriting a dictionary in my browser. And within two weeks, I got up to speed. I started pattern matching and understood that my role as a product manager was not to actually build the technical solution. I didn’t need to know how to do that — I needed to understand just enough to be dangerous. My goal was for the technology to deliver on the business objectives that the solution was made for. Once I realized that, I pivoted my mind to focus on the skills I was bringing to the table. Needless to say, we launched on time and with great success.
Women supporting women is what it’s all about. In my early career, I was extremely fortunate to have had some strong female leaders who would encourage my ambition. I took every opportunity to get exposed to tech while I was in a purely operational role. I constantly sought opportunities around me, like doing hackathons, networking, and understanding patterns and trends.
I’ve also joined a bunch of different organizations, and I would recommend groups like Tech Ladies or Elpha. These organizations are specifically designed to help women get jobs or advance their careers in technology. Usually, they come with a job board and a blog, so you can read tips and tricks and go to their events. There’s also no shortage of podcasts and books, and one that I recommend to everyone is the Diary of a CEO episode with Reshma Saujani, who founded Girls Who Code. It’s an incredible interview.
I think DEI programs are important, specifically a women’s network to provide a safe space for sisterhood and idea sharing to blossom. At Brigham, I was on the board of the Multicultural Members of Partners, which was an employee-led organization. It was diversity-focused in general, so we focused on promoting minorities and women into different roles. We had speaking events, skill development workshops, and intra-organizational structured networking. It helped a lot of folks transition between departments and find opportunities they didn’t know were there.
Then, at Langone, I co-founded a Women’s Forum with a similar playbook. We had speakers from inside and outside the org come and talk about breaking the barriers of what’s possible. Women often limit themselves, so we looked to bring people in to inspire us all to aim higher and give tools and build communities to help us do that.
A really powerful aspect of these events was when senior leaders and C-suite executives would come in and talk about how they got where they were, get vulnerable, and talk about their failures. The unpolished real version of one’s success story is a lot more relatable and inspiring. That’s what women in organizations should do more of to help uplift each other.
It starts with ourselves, and a good place to reflect is in hiring practices. Check yourself for bias when you’re hiring or advancing your team. Make sure that everyone gets a fair chance and that you’re not prioritizing one group over the other. It’s very human — everybody has biases, so developing a set of scoring mechanisms that prevent that is the best approach.
I’ve also worked closely with HR partners to optimize the hiring process in ways like removing the degree requirements. If I’m hiring for a product for a project manager, for example, a degree is not necessary. I want to make sure I look at the job posts and have them accessible to people. I encourage recruiters to adjust job descriptions to be more people-skills-focused, especially for early career positions. Also, you’ve got to train your recruiting team on what to look for. Hire for potential and core human skills.
One of my best hires ever was a person who had been a floor associate at Target. I was looking for a project coordinator on a very complex EMR project, and I wanted someone who was organized, had critical thinking, and was a quick study — everything else is easy to teach. They ended up being absolutely phenomenal and went on to develop a very successful career in health tech themselves.
In terms of mentoring, it goes without saying to mentor the talent around you. Do this for your direct reports, but also seek out talent across the aisle who has the potential or interest to benefit from your knowledge. There are a lot of great organizations to partner with as well, such as Extraordinary Women in Technology. Companies can offer them physical space to host events that cost you nothing but will create an opportunity for people in your organization to see what’s possible.
Healthcare is a phenomenal industry — I highly recommend health tech to everyone. There are so many problems to help solve. Every field has its own compliance challenges, and my take is that it can be fun and actually adds necessary boundaries to the creative process, which unleashes more. It forces the team to get out of their comfort zone, and then you often end up in places where you wouldn’t have otherwise.
For example, when I worked at another health system in New York, I oversaw their patient experience portfolio. At the time, the 21st Century Cures Act was being enforced, which required patients to have easy access to their health records. We had to start releasing patient results onto the patient portal immediately, but up until that point, we had a bit of a hesitant clinical team. The hypothesis was that patients would get scared and anxious seeing the results before the clinician could walk them through it.
We had no choice but to think through how to mitigate the hypothetical blow. What could we do in terms of designing content? How can we prepare patients for what they might see? Once we went live and started releasing all the lab and test results onto the portal, patients would get them right away. It turns out they liked it. Of course, it was still a difficult environment, but the volume of calls and anxious messages didn’t increase.
Many patients got what they needed. When you work specifically with cancer populations, one of the worst things for patients is waiting and not knowing. When you get a cancer diagnosis, your whole world is changing. You’re looking to grab onto something that you could do, to feel a sense of agency and control, and that’s often looking at your results. It gives you the next step. We gave them a better process, but without the compliance forcing us, who knows when we would have achieved that result?
It always goes back to the same core problem. Rule number one — you have to start with a clear understanding of your core product identity. What’s the ultimate big problem that you’re looking to solve, how would you measure the success, and do you have the right measures of success? Are you a marketplace? Are you a health portal? If you don’t spend the time to crystallize that and your product identity doesn’t match your main business proposition, you won’t see business results. Or worse, you can get some false positives.
As a quick anecdote, I worked with a company that was operating in a behavioral health space. They had built a new solution and were trying to understand how it was doing. When we looked at their success metrics, we found that the new product increased the total number of provider visits. They immediately declared that a success. I questioned that further, and uncovered that, yes, while the visits with the providers went up, it was actually not driving patients to the right level of care and exacerbated the provider scarcity problem. They had a false positive due to an identity mismatch.
Once you are clear on your core proposition, you start layering in user characteristics. In addition to the tried-and-true frameworks like jobs to be done, in the health space, I like to add a health-related dimension. It could be an acuity scale if you are focused on a particular condition or specialty-based if you are building for a large provider with multiple service lines.
Depending on your goals as a business, this is where additional segmentation comes in. Health equity is very important. Then of course, you’ve got to think through the Pareto rule, which addresses the 20 percent of your user base that’s going to account for 80 percent of your success. Solve for that first before you start solving for everything all at once.
The other really important consideration when you think through experience in healthcare is empathy. A health user is a completely different kind of user. When they use your products, they’re likely not having their best day. They don’t feel good. When you work in cancer space, it’s likely the worst period of their lives. You have to really think about how your product and the experience that you’re building make their day just a little bit better.
Sure. One of the common themes in the cancer space is to map to patient stages of disease: pre-diagnosis, in-treatment, remission, etc. What I learned working with actual cancer patients was that they hated that classification. They didn’t identify with it at all! Cancer is not a linear experience — it’s the ultimate chronic condition. Once you have it, your life is never going to be the same.
What was more helpful for user segmentation was age, or, more accurately, it was the phases of people’s lives. A young person under 30, who is just starting out, will have a very different experience with their cancer diagnosis, than an 80-year-old. They are in a different space financially, mentally, and socially. That realization helped the company completely rethink its approach to user experience design, and what capabilities were offered to different groups.
I see a future with GenAI and agentic architecture. Conversational solutions are taking off. I’d expect to see a lot more healthcare side-by-side where it’s just part of your daily life. You’re not even consciously interacting with it, but your data is working for you and every choice you make is a predictor of your success.
Trends-wise, I’m glad to see value-based care and population health are taking off. For a while, they were just nice to have. Now, there is a lot of proof that it’s actually beneficial for the bottom line, and that’s what’s driving a lot of interest.
Generally, there’s been the realization that healthcare is not a hero-player type of environment. Health is complicated. Many things impact every individual. A value chain and different players are bringing different pieces to it. Only together can we truly, meaningfully impact someone long-term.
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