John Fitzpatrick has been involved with KC Digital Drive since its founding in 2012, and has been instrumental in leading the long-standing convenings of the Kansas City region’s Health Innovation Team. He will be expanding and leading the organization’s projects at the nexus of digital equity and health innovation and helping to support the Digital Health KC initiative along with BioNexus KC

For more than 30 years, John has focused on health promotion and management, typically involving large-scale information technology solutions, including domain knowledge, software, networking, hardware, services, and strategic business-process change. John managed relationships in global business development and strategy at Cerner for 15 years, but it’s his experience in developing countries where he found his passion for community-level health and its impacts. 

John has been addressing population health and personalized medicine for over 20 years. He has worked on regional health schemes in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the Americas, and a broad range of Pacific Rim countries. John spent years working with senior executives, government leaders, and multilateral agencies on the many facets of technology-supported health strategies, including deep involvement in 1995-97 in what remains one of the world’s most robust definitions of consumer-focused digital health – the government of Malaysia’s Personalized Lifetime Health Plan.

John has deep experience in the non-profit health sector, initially as a resident of a World Bank housing project in Nairobi, Kenya, and more recently on a world-wide basis in program design and microfinance with Water.org

KC Digital Drive is thrilled to have John join the organization as a fulltime Community Health Strategist where he’ll lead research, events, and projects for the Health Innovation Team and health equity initiatives for the organization.

Further Reading

KC Digital Drive Collaboration with New Programming at Literacy KC

Kansas City non-profit Literacy KC has expanded its services to include not just traditional and digital literacy, but health and financial literacy, as well. These topics now fit nicely into the online and in-class hybrid learning that Literacy KC offers. In health, this includes things like knowing the roles of various practitioners, choosing a health […]

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National Community Health Worker Awareness Week

It is estimated that only 10 – 20 percent of a person’s health status is related to direct medical care. The rest is taken up by what the World Health Organization says are the “conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, and the wider set of forces and systems shaping the conditions of daily life.” Our social circumstances play the dominant role in how healthy we are.

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Comeback KC Celebration Story

The UMKC Technology Venture Studio and KC Digital Drive teams celebrated March 7
Comeback KC Ventures, a program that supported innovations that aim to solve pandemic-
related issues, built in just 18 months. It was a culmination of work and community
collaboration these past 20 months that led to new companies, the growth of others and most
importantly the broad impacts of our Comeback KC Ventures fellows’ efforts to curb the impact
of the pandemic on the Kansas City region and beyond.

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