The MassTLC Tech Top 50 celebrates tech companies and leaders across the region who have made a significant impact in the community during the past 12 month. This year, we are excited to recognize winners across 11 categories: Business Accomplishment, Environmental Impact, Leadership, Mosaic (for DEI leadership), Social Responsibility Impact, and the Technology of the Year categories: Advanced Manufacturing, Clean Tech, Consumer Tech, Cybersecurity, Healthcare Tech, and Robotics.
Forty-nine honorees were chosen across these categories, with the final recognition, the Commonwealth Award, given to industry pioneer and co-creator of the spreadsheet, Dan Bricklin. View the full list of Tech Top 50 winners, here.
Over the course of the next few weeks, we’ll be sharing more about each of the recipients to spotlight their accomplishments and their impact on customers, partners, employees, and the broader community.
Today, meet Allyson Livingstone, one of this year’s honorees for the Mosaic Award. The MassTLC Mosaic award recognizes an individual for their exemplary leadership within their company in the development of a more equitable, inclusive, and diverse tech workforce in Massachusetts.
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What programs or policies has this individual created in the past year that have made a meaningful impact in their company’s development of a more equitable, inclusive, and diverse tech workforce?
Led by Livingstone, athenahealth launched its first company-wide Diversity & Inclusion strategy, which engages the entire organization and is centered around attracting, retaining, and developing people with diverse backgrounds, experiences, and perspectives with a commitment to transparently sharing progress with employees.
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic illuminated the significant impact of health inequities in the United States. To help make a difference, Allyson Livingstone, Executive Director of Diversity and Inclusion at athenahealth, was a key collaborator as part of a cross-divisional team that launched the first company-wide hackathon, Hack for Health Equity, where a Gender-Affirming Care (GAC) solution was born. The solution, designed to support health equity by improving the experiences of transgender and non-binary individuals through their healthcare experiences quickly moved on to athenahealth’s first-ever Codefest, where 100+ employees participated in a week-long event to code the functionality that would help to close the gap in gender-affirming care. The Codefest was the first time athenahealth designed, developed, tested, and released production-quality features to customers in only five days.
What impact did these accomplishments have on your company?
athenahealth’s leadership believes a company’s most important asset is its people. Recruiting and retaining a diverse and inclusive workforce enables athenahealth to build innovative products that can better address equity gaps in healthcare delivery and outcomes, as shown through the incredible outcome of the athenahealth’s Hack for Health Equity.
Also, last year athenahealth exceeded its external hiring goals for representation of women and Black and Latinx/ Hispanic identifying people, and the percentage of women in leadership roles grew. In fact, women were just as or more likely than men to experience internal mobility.
Further highlighting athenahealth’s commitment to investing in its people and fostering a culture of belonging and inclusion, the company, led by Livingstone, launched an Inclusive Leadership 101: Unconscious Bias / Understanding Bias to Unleash Potential course to all managers and HR staff. More than 2,500 employees took the course, reflecting a 97% completion rate, with 90% of employees saying that the course made them more aware of the impact of biases in the workplace and 93% committing to taking a more active role to reduce the impact of biases in their work.
What does it mean to be recognized with the other Tech Top 50 honorees?
I am honored to be recognized among the other amazing individuals across the state. I am so thrilled to live in a community where individual leaders and organizations are making such a significant impact across industries with the goal of making the world a better place.
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Congraulations to Allyson Livingstone!
