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.

Michael Levy is the co-founder and CEO of DHIT, the Digital Health Institute for Transformation. In this episode, Michael shares why he believes we need to flip the model and build healthcare systems that start with the needs of the people, not the structures already in place. From health innovation sprints to the “periodic table of health,” Michael unpacks what it takes to move from talk to transformation.

In a system built for volume, not value, Michael Levy is working to reimagine the rules. As CEO of DHIT, he’s helping healthcare leaders and organizations rethink digital transformation not as a one-time strategy, but as a continuous, people-first process.

In this episode, Michael walks us through the principles behind DHIT’s Health Innovation Sprints – hyperlocal, human-centered programs that start with listening to communities, then build from there. He challenges the top-down RFP model, arguing that access and equity demand co-creation from the ground up.

He also discusses the cultural shift required to move from “sick care” to “experience care,” and what it means for health systems to operate more like responsive ecosystems than static institutions. For anyone trying to marry digital tools with deeper impact, Michael’s approach offers a powerful roadmap.

Find DHIT’s new Periodic Table of Health here!

Meet Michael Levy

Michael spends his time and energy leading the Digital Health Institute for Transformation (DHIT) a 501(C-3) that supports communities through the process of digital transformation.

Michael is an experienced healthcare executive turned entrepreneur, with a purpose-driven mindset. He is on a path to unite culture, process, people, and technology to create a new healthcare operating system for the 21st century.

Michael has held leadership roles as Vice Chair of Administration for the Department of Medicine at the University of Miami Health System, Director of Clinical Operations for UNC Health Care’s specialty ambulatory clinics, as well as several other leadership roles at UCLA Health within various clinical departments. Michael has also served as the first Entrepreneur-in-Residence for the Center for Health Innovation at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he designed and developed their Digital Health Program in support of UNC’s Digital Transformation strategy.

As an entrepreneur, Michael was COO of Digital Therapy, a cognitive computing platform powered by IBM Watson in the behavioral health space. He is Co-founder of Bluedoor Group, a digital health growth and innovation agency.

Michael earned his BS in Neuroscience from Tulane University and his MBA from Elon University.

Dr. Jay Sanders has been called the “father of telemedicine,” but in this episode, he’s far more focused on the future than the past. As the architect of the first statewide telemedicine system and founding president of the American Telemedicine Association, Dr. Sanders has spent five decades advocating for a model of care that meets patients where they are, both physically and technologically. In this deep and wide-ranging conversation, he shares what the industry still hasn’t learned from its earliest telehealth successes, why the patient’s home is still the best exam room, and how AI is reshaping the future of care delivery.

Dr. Sanders began working in telemedicine in the late 1960s, helping establish one of the first TV-based medical systems in Boston. He went on to design Georgia’s first statewide telemedicine system in the 1990s and played a key role in founding the American Telemedicine Association (ATA). But for all his groundbreaking achievements, he believes the real revolution is still to come.

He shared powerful examples from early telehealth pilots, like installing coaxial-powered party-line connections in rural Georgia homes to track high-risk patients post-discharge. These efforts, though limited by technology, revealed fundamental truths: the best exam room is the patient’s home, and context matters more than clinical protocol.

Dr. Sanders pushed the ATA forward, but acknowledges it took a pandemic to unlock widespread telemedicine adoption. He calls on the industry to move beyond convenience toward equity, and to reimagine insurance models that reward prevention instead of just treatment.

From autonomous medical robots on Mars to AI-powered diagnostic tools in our homes, Dr. Sanders urges a shift to anticipatory, precision-driven care. He sees a future where AI interprets symptoms, wearable sensors detect early changes, and clinicians act as partners in a system built around individual needs. His message is urgent but optimistic: the technology is here, it’s the mindset that must catch up.

Meet Dr. Jay Sanders

Jay H. Sanders, M.D., is the CEO of The Global Telemedicine Group, Professor of Medicine (Adjunct) at Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, the Founding Board Member, President Emeritus and Fellow of the American Telemedicine Association and he chaired the Scientific, Military and Medical Advisory Board of the National Science Foundation/NC State University ASSIST Nano-systems Sensor Center.

Known to many as the "Father of Telemedicine", he was responsible for developing the first Statewide telemedicine system, the first Correctional telemedicine program, the first Tele-homecare technology, called "The Electronic House Call", and the first Telemedicine kiosk.

His consulting activities have included NASA, DOD, HHS, the VA, the FCC, State Governments, the Southern Governors Association, the MIT Media Lab, WHO, academic institutions, investment firms, Fortune 500 companies, and International Governments. In 1994, he introduced telemedicine’s capability to the Assistant Secretary of Defense that culminated in the initiation of the use of this technology within DOD. He was subsequently asked to serve as the sole civilian representative on the DOD Telemedicine Board of Directors with the Surgeon Generals of the Army, Navy and Air Force. During the Clinton Administration he represented the USA to the G8 nations for telemedicine, and was appointed by former HHS Secretary Leavitt, to the Chronic Care Workgroup.

In this episode of Access Amplified, Joanna sits down with Chrissy Kuahine, Director of Tech Equity at Waianae Coast Comprehensive Health Center. Together, they explore what it means to deliver true whole-person care in a community with one road in, one road out, and a huge digital divide. Chrissy shares how her team uses creative strategies, like telehealth kiosks in grocery stores and youth-led digital literacy for elders, to bring healthcare and essential services directly to the people.

If you're interested in learning more about Tech Savvy Teens, you can take a look at their work here: https://techsavvyteens.org/

Meet Chrissy Kuahine

Chrissy Kuahine has 35 years of experience at Wai‘anae Coast Comprehensive Health Center (WCCHC), where she began as a Registered Medical Assistant before transitioning to Health Information Technology (HIT) and specializing in Electronic Health Records (EHR). As Director of Tech Equity, Chrissy leads initiatives to bridge the digital divide and improve access to technology-driven healthcare solutions. Her leadership in telehealth and digital literacy earned WCCHC the 2024 Techquity in Action Award from the American Medical Association (AMA). Chrissy holds a Master of Information Systems (MIS) and is currently pursuing a Master of Public Health to further contribute to improving healthcare delivery and equity.

Dr. John Jenkins, Medical Director of School-Based Care at Cone Health, joins Access Amplified to explore how school-based telehealth is transforming healthcare access for children. From full-time telepresenters to behavioral health integration and family-centered support, Dr. Jenkins shares the innovations, partnerships, and passion driving one of the country’s most equitable care models.

When most people think about school, they picture classrooms, cafeterias, and maybe the occasional nurse’s office, not a HIPAA-compliant telehealth clinic. But for Dr. John Jenkins, Medical Director of School-Based Care at Cone Health, schools are the new front lines in the fight for equitable healthcare.

Dr. Jenkins joins host Joanna Braunold to share how a bold idea launched during the pandemic has evolved into one of the country’s most impactful digital health programs. What began as a COVID-era solution to reduce unnecessary dismissals has grown into a full-scale telehealth initiative operating in dozens of Title I elementary schools across North Carolina.

At the heart of the model? Full-time telepresenters: trained medical assistants embedded in schools who partner with remote clinicians to deliver high-quality exams, manage chronic conditions, and respond to student needs in real time. It’s a model that not only reduces chronic absenteeism and ER overuse but also builds trust with families by delivering care in a space that’s already familiar, safe, and accessible.

Throughout the conversation, Dr. Jenkins shares how his team is going beyond acute care to support the “whole child,” adding behavioral health services, addressing social determinants, and connecting families with critical resources through embedded community care workers. He reflects on what it really takes to build equitable systems of care, the power of representation and relationship-building, and why schools might just be the future of pediatric healthcare.

Meet Dr. John Jenkins

Dr. John Jenkins is the Medical Director of School-Based Care at Cone Health, focusing on innovative telehealth in schools. He spearheaded telehealth programs in Guilford County's Title One elementary schools, supported by Duke Endowment and ARPA funds. Previously, he engaged in academic medicine, including roles in digital health education and telehealth projects. As the former Senior Vice President at Connected Care Cone Health, he developed ambulatory telehealth strategies and collaborated on virtual visits. Dr. Jenkins also contributes to community leadership, emphasizing digital health for enhanced access and equity.

Abby Losinski, Director of Telehealth at St. Luke’s Health System, is helping redefine what healthcare access looks like in rural communities. With over 18 years of experience across clinical, technical, and operational roles, she’s leading programs that bring care directly to patients, whether at home, in a library, or even through their local fire department. In this episode, Abby shares how her team is scaling virtual care, building trust in the community, and applying a startup mindset inside a large health system.

St. Luke’s Health System in Idaho faces a tough challenge: nearly every county it serves is designated as a healthcare provider shortage area. To tackle that, Abby Losinski and her team are rethinking how and where care is delivered. They’ve created a 24/7 on-demand virtual care service that supports everything from mental health needs to medication refills, no matter whether the patient is established with St. Luke’s or not.

Beyond urgent care, Abby has built a network of “bridge programs” to help patients waiting to establish care. These programs are proactively offered through ED referrals, virtual intake, and central scheduling, with one simple but powerful question: “Would you like to establish care today?”

Perhaps most creatively, St. Luke’s is meeting patients where they are. Telehealth hubs are being placed in libraries, YMCAs, and even fire department trucks. These hubs help people who don’t have internet, technology, or privacy at home to still access care with dignity and ease. Local staff are trained as digital navigators, and a nurse practitioner visits each hub regularly to build trust and provide real-time support.

Abby’s consumer-first approach is reshaping access across the system, and showing what’s possible when health systems are willing to move fast, listen deeply, and design around people’s real lives.

Meet Abby Losinski

Abby Losinski is the Director of Telehealth at St. Luke’s Health System in Idaho, where she is dedicated to enhancing patient access through innovative virtual care solutions. She has been instrumental in developing St. Luke’s programs allowing patients to receive remote care from home, school, or other community settings, thereby reducing the need for in-person and emergency visits. Losinski’s leadership emphasizes a patient-centered approach to virtual care, ensuring telehealth is integrated as a core component of St. Luke’s services.

Losinski has over 18 years of experience in healthcare. She holds a Bachelor of Science in Healthcare Management and a Master of Healthcare Administration from Colorado State University. In addition, she is a Licensed Practical Nurse (LPN) and a Certified Epic Software builder, bringing a comprehensive clinical and technical background to her role. Her combined expertise in healthcare leadership, clinical practice, technology, and telehealth strategy enables her to lead St. Luke’s in providing accessible and efficient healthcare options for patients across Idaho and the surrounding areas.