Eden Avraham-Katz, J.D. | 2024 Emerging Leaders in Healthcare

Eden Avraham-Katz, J.D.

I spent the majority of my childhood and young adult years in North Carolina, which includes attending college at Elon University. After graduating from Elon in 2012, I attended Northeastern University School of Law in Boston. I knew I wanted to be an attorney since the age of 7, but it was during my second year at Northeastern, through my participation in the Intellectual Property Law Clinic, where I developed my love of working with start-up companies.

After graduating, I took an in-house role at InterSystems Corporation in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where I got my first taste of the healthcare industry. My knowledge and experience in the healthcare space developed during my next jobas corporate counsel at PatientPing, Inc., now Bamboo Health, where I developed both a deeper understanding of privacy law and an appreciation for the health-tech industry, as well as developed the skill sets necessary to be the general counsel of 1upHealth.

Please describe a turning point in your career — an event, a eureka moment, am encounter or a salient piece of advice from someone.

I think a true turning point in my career was was when I became a consumer of our healthcare system through my mother’s battle with pancreatic cancer. Despite how broken our system is and the burden that places on families, patients and caregivers, I came across so many amazing doctors and nurses who truly wanted to give my mother the best care they could. We hear so many jarring statistics in this industry, and until those numbers get faces added to them, they are quite easy to disregard. However, despite all statistics, it was the same incredibly broken healthcare system that gave my mother seven years of life she would not have otherwise had. It was that very realization that made all the frustration at this system, both personally and professionally, worth every second.

What are your top two priorities as leader in your organization and in healthcare?

As an attorney in the healthcare space, my first priority is always patient privacy. How do we ensure that an individual’s right to privacy is protected and that their data (are) secure? My second priority, which sometimes (and by sometimes, I mean almost always) feels in conflict with the first, is how can we improve the healthcare industry today by supporting the ability to exchange relevant data in a safe and secure manner to all organizations and entities such information to provide better, more cost-effective care?

If you could change one thing about U.S. healthcare, what would it be?

This is a really hard question to answer because the system is inherently so broken, but the first thing I would work to change is helping to shift the perspective held so strongly today around data sharing. Although we have seen an uptick in both state and federal regulations in support of interoperability, there is still so much hesitation to share data. Most of the concern is couched under the guise of protecting patient privacy, but the reality is that organizations do not really want to share certain data because it both negatively impacts some of their financial incentives andthe relatively high administrative cost.

Name a book or article that everyone working in healthcare should read.

“America’s Bitter Pill: Money, Politics, Backroom Deals, and the Fight to Fix Our Broken Healthcare System” by Steven Brill.

How do you think the right work-life balance?

I think is really important to set clear boundaries around working hours and, barring emergency situations or time-sensitive matters, really holding myself to those boundaries. Earlier in my career, when I used to receive emails or Slacks after hours or on the weekend, I felt immediate pressure to respond, and as a result, I missed out on moments with friends and family. After a very challenging 2023, I feel like I have really had a shift in perspective, and while it sounds cliché, it is just so true that at work, we are all replaceable, but at home, we are really not.

If you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, would would it be and why?

Last year was a hard year. I lost my mother to pancreatic cancer in late September, so she would be the obvious choice for me here. There have been so many times over the last few months where I wish I could call her, and while I would love to be able to share all the updates in my life, what I would want the most is to get to see her again and spend time with her while she was not suffering or in pain.