Sam McGinnis, Associate Vice President – Practice Operations at Atrium Health Levine Children’s, leads one of the country’s most expansive school-based virtual care programs. In this episode, he shares how his team brings care to over 150 schools, and why school nurses are still at the heart of it all.

In this episode, Sam McGinnis shares the origin, growth, and future of Advocate Health and Atrium Health Levine Children’s school-based virtual care model. It all started with a pilot at Graham Elementary in Cleveland County, where chronic absenteeism and lack of primary care access sparked a new idea. By embedding trained telepresenters into schools, Sam’s team created a model that supports school nurses, scales across states, and delivers care where and when families need it most.

With over 50,000 visits completed and outcomes like reduced ER usage and faster return to class, the program is a model for expanding pediatric access. Sam also shares how they’re looking beyond the school day into evenings, weekends, and even home-based care with virtual primary care and urgent care options designed for real family life.

Meet Sam McGinnis

As Associate Vice President – Practice Operations at Atrium Health Levine Children's, Sam is a passionate advocate for expanding access to quality pediatric care. His expertise in care coordination and virtual services has been instrumental in driving transformative initiatives, particularly his dedication to bringing healthcare directly to students and staff through school-based telemedicine.

Sam’s vision has been significant in scaling this program to nearly 150 schools across North Carolina, ensuring vulnerable children in underserved communities receive timely and easily accessible medical care. Witnessing firsthand the impact of the work, he describes school-based telemedicine as "one of the most rewarding and exciting experiences of my career," a sentiment echoing the countless families whose lives have been touched by this innovative program.

Sam’s leadership is defined by a deep empathy for patients, a keen understanding of healthcare challenges, and an unwavering commitment to finding innovative solutions. His work at Atrium Health Levine Children's serves as a shining example of how technology and compassionate care can revolutionize access to medical services, particularly for those who need it most.

In his spare time, Sam enjoys outdoor activities, including golf, vegetable gardening, and whitewater kayaking in the beautiful North Carolina mountains.

Janna Guinen, Executive Director of the HLTH Foundation, joins Access Amplified to talk about building a healthcare future where technology serves everyone, regardless of income, location, or background. She shares how the HLTH Foundation is leading the global techquity movement and unveils their upcoming database of real-world case studies designed to help innovators, payers, and providers turn equity from a concept into concrete action.

The HLTH Foundation, under Janna Guinen’s leadership, has made techquity, the intentional integration of equity into healthcare technology, its central mission. For Janna, this work is urgent: technology can be a game-changer for access, but only if it’s designed and distributed with underserved patients in mind. Her own path to this focus began after hearing the term “techquity” from Dr. Kyu Rhee, CEO of the National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC), inspiring her to align the Foundation’s work around it.

HLTH Foundation’s Techquity for Health Awards recognize global leaders creating digital health solutions that advance equity. Now in their third year, the awards feed into a first-of-its-kind Techquity Case Study Database, launching this month, featuring over 70 high-scoring projects from organizations of all sizes. Janna highlights examples like Elevance Health’s enterprise-wide equity-driven data restructuring and Waianae Comprehensive Health Center’s elder-focused telehealth literacy program—both showing the power of intentional design, community engagement, and iterative improvement.

Beyond celebrating best practices, the database is meant to inspire and guide others, offering practical, replicable approaches to embedding equity. Janna emphasizes that techquity isn’t just for underserved groups; it’s about creating better healthcare for everyone. For system-wide impact, she calls for strong measurement, trust-building with patients, and encouraging organizations to “just start,” even small, intentional steps can have outsized effects when replicated across the industry.

Meet Janna Guinen

As HLTH Foundation’s first Executive Director, Janna Guinen has shaped the foundation’s mission and strategy to promote equitable and inclusive healthcare from the ground up. Since joining HLTH Foundation in 2020, Janna has led significant growth of CSweetener, the foundation’s free healthcare mentorship program for women and nonbinary healthcare executives, and launched initiatives and programs in techquity (digital health equity), patient inclusion and healthcare leadership--with a focus on underserved or underrepresented people. Throughout her career she has advised providers and health tech innovators on communications, content strategy, program development and executive visibility.

Sheila Phicil has spent her career inside some of the country’s leading health systems before launching Phicil-itate Change, a new innovation studio focused on building tech that actually works for the patients it's meant to serve. In this episode, Sheila breaks down why so many digital health tools fail, what real-world patient engagement looks like, and how health systems can get closer to product-system fit by designing with, not just for, the people they serve.

Sheila Phicil knows both sides of the equation. After nearly two decades leading innovation inside hospitals like Brigham and Women’s and Boston Medical Center, she’s now building a platform designed to solve one of digital health’s biggest gaps: understanding what patients actually need.

In this episode, Sheila explains why 98% of digital health startups fail and how health systems can learn from those failures. She introduces the SEEDS framework, a practical approach to equity-centered innovation, and shares stories of tools that succeeded because they were easy, human-centered, and designed to reduce friction across the entire system.

We also hear about Listen Phirst, a new AI-enabled platform that lets patients share their experiences in real time, in their own language, in their preferred format, and with control over how their data is used. Her advice to founders and care teams: design for the patients with the most barriers, and you'll end up creating a solution that works better for everyone.

Meet Sheila Phicil

Sheila Phicil is a social change futurist™ reshaping how the world builds technology for care. As the founder of Phicil-itate Change, she leads an innovation studio that transforms complex healthcare challenges into market-ready, radically patient-centered solutions—embedding justice into design from day one.

At the heart of Phicil-itate Change is the SEEDS Innovation Framework, a structured methodology Sheila created to accelerate product-system fit. SEEDS guides innovators from problem validation to scaling by co-designing with patients, aligning with healthcare ecosystems, and ensuring sustainable adoption. It's used by founders, accelerators, and health systems to de-risk innovation and secure meaningful traction.

Sheila is also the creator of the COMPASS Platform, a blockchain- and AI-enabled infrastructure that collects multilingual, multimodal patient narratives and transforms them into real-time design intelligence. Patients retain dynamic consent and are compensated each time their data is used—redefining data sovereignty in digital health. COMPASS eliminates the guesswork in innovation by matching patient stories to specific product features and go-to-market strategies, ensuring solutions are not only used, but trusted and sustained.

With nearly two decades of experience across institutions like Brigham and Women’s Hospital, the Veterans Health Administration, and Boston Medical Center—where she led equity innovation as Director of the Health Equity Accelerator—Sheila has fused executive-level operations with deep community-rooted insight. Her work has been recognized with the BMC Leadership Impact Award and selection as a Fellow to the Massachusetts Health Leadership College.

She holds dual master’s degrees in Public Health and Financial Economics, is a Certified Project Management Professional (PMP), and a Fellow of the American College of Healthcare Executives (FACHE). Her ethos is simple but non-negotiable: every system is perfectly designed to produce the results it gets. So she aims to build better systems, with equity built in, in order to get better results.

Sheila's upcoming book will continue to anchor the future of social innovation in truth, consent, and lived experience.