By Molly English-Bowers
Before she became the President and CEO of HealtheConnections, Elizabeth Amato was young teacher in Charlotte, N.C., discovering that her true calling lay beyond the classroom. She felt pulled back to her time working in women’s health in an ambulatory care setting — a decision that would launch the next 20 years of her health IT career.
“I realized pretty quickly that I was drawn to healthcare, which was perfect considering the timing of the emergence of the electronic health records and health information exchange industries” Amato said. “I came into this field at the right time.”
Today, she leads HealtheConnections, a nonprofit organization providing health information exchange (HIE) services and expertise to more than 4,600 health and care offices and the 16+ million patients they serve. Amato, 45, is a Rochester native with deep roots in the area. She attended St. John Fisher University in Rochester for her undergraduate degrees of Education and Psychology before earning a graduate degree in Health Administration from Roberts Wesleyan University.
Amato is a respected leader in the health IT space. She has an extensive background in HIE, health data, government relations, policy and compliance, with focused expertise on program development and design, advocacy, research, and source funding.
Her healthcare journey began in 2006 at an OB/GYN office, where she worked as assistant administrator. “I started this phase of my career when electronic medical records first became attainable for doctors’ offices,” Amato said. “I found it very interesting, and at the same time I could see the potential for how it could help doctors’ offices operate more efficiently.”
Step by step she accumulated knowledge in the field: She worked for three and a half years as Director of Health Information Technology at Innovative Solutions, in West Henrietta, then spent nearly nine years at the New York eHealth Collaborative in New York City and Albany, eventually rising to Vice President of Programs & Service Management. There, she was able to drive statewide programs that helped establish and grow New York’s HIE networks and help set statewide policy, naturally positioning her to step into her role today running a successful HIE.
Leading the Way in HIE
Amato started at HealtheConnections in January 2022 as Vice President of HIE Services and Operations. In January 2024, she rose to Senior Vice President and Chief Operating Officer. As CEO, she is leading the organization into its next chapter by prioritizing innovation, adaptability, and long-term planning.
HealtheConnections is one of six HIEs in New York that comprise the Statewide Health Information Network for New York (SHIN-NY). “As a network, we work with 85 to 90 percent of doctor’s offices, nursing homes, and home-care practices and 100 percent of hospitals,” she said.
Most patients aren’t aware of HealtheConnections and what it does. Its primary role is to provide a patient’s health data to their care teams, including primary care doctors, emergency departments, nursing homes and care managers. The medical community can access records when they need them, quickly and securely, because they’re all stored in HealtheConnections’ system.
Does your physician need to see recent bloodwork? They use HealtheConnections to access it. Does patient information need to be transferred to a specialist? HealtheConnections makes that happen electronically. Does a county Health Department need to understand the demographics of residents with diabetes? HealtheConnections is the source.
“Years ago, if you had to see a specialist, a patient would have to call and request their records and maybe pick them up or have them faxed,” Amato explained. “For the past 15 years, our organization and others like us have focused on making that easy using technology, so that it’s happening in the background and your records are available when and where your doctor needs them.”
Similarly, HealtheConnections works with municipal public health departments to organize and understand information about their local populations. “We do a lot of supportive work for public health departments and agencies,” Amato said. “It’s in our DNA going back to the beginning – making the data we have useful and available to local health departments so they can understand the healthcare status and needs of their communities.”
Overall, it’s about focusing on healthcare outcomes. “It’s not just how many surgeries were done, but were the outcomes better?” Amato said. “Are patients staying out of the hospital, are they staying healthy, are they getting the home care they need? Are patients actually getting better? We can measure that because we have the data.”
All this sharing of data relies upon robust, modern technological infrastructure. “Just this week (late October 2025) we launched a platform we’ve been working on for several years,”Amato said. This project has been in the works for several years, so it didn’t begin under Amato’s leadership, but she has confidently stepped in to support its completion.
“I’m proud of the work that this team has accomplished, and that in my first year as CEO we are able to bring this major project over the finish line and launch it,” Amato said. “It uses the latest technology offerings in the healthcare data industry, and it’s what we call “cloud-native”. It’s not dependent on legacy types of hardware and infrastructure. We’re using scalable and adaptable tools that are unique in our space. That’s going to allow us to be highly responsive to data requests from our participants, be able to offer better analyses, and much more.”
“Based on the way it’s built, we’re never locked in to what’s available in 2025,” she continued. “We can keep iterating, which is going to help us stay resilient and relevant as an organization and it’s going to help us better serve our participants and our partners in getting them the data they need.”
She knows that the organization will be responsive to meet the next wave of health challenges. “As populations grow and change, the core mission of what we do is even more important,” Amato said. “The demands on healthcare aren’t new since COVID, but COVID highlighted some cracks in healthcare systems. Doing more with less and seizing the opportunity to be helpful —having useful information medical professionals need —that’s where we really shine.”
Preparing for What’s Next
HealtheConnections continues to support patient-centric, value-based care, as well as develop the resources that enable better outcomes, efficiency, and affordability. Amato’s team is prioritizing the strategies and initiatives that support those goals not only locally, but statewide.
“Organizations like ours are starting to play a more active role in one specific area where we might be one of the only service providers for a certain type of HIE service, or we might be one of two that are providing a certain service,” Amato explained. “That’s another area of our growth strategy—continuing to stand out as one of the statewide partners, certainly, but also how we directly serve our participants within our regions through new, better, faster, smarter tools and services.”
That statewide collaboration is boosting HealtheConnections’ current growth. “We’re very proud of the fact that in 2025 we were awarded two contracts to play bigger roles as part of this statewide network, and we hope there’s more of that to come,” Amato said.
At one time, there were a dozen HIEs in New York; consolidations and mergers reduced that number to the current six. Amato believes it is currently more important than ever for HIEs to operate resourcefully and add value to a variety of stakeholders.
“HealtheConnections and our statewide partners are very focused on making sure we’re efficient and that we’re doing the best we can in reducing duplication and overlap. That’s the efficiency goal that the state’s working on.”
Privacy is always a concern with health information, but New Yorkers needn’t worry. “New York State is very good at this,” Amato said. “It was one of the earliest adopters of health information exchanges, so there’s a long history of thorough, diligent policymaking to ensure patient confidentiality and provider comfort level while supporting the state’s needs. It’s very appropriately and tightly controlled, which is important for people 
to know.”
Workplace Culture
Taking on a new, executive role in any organization can be daunting, but Amato’s three years at HeC before assuming the role of President and CEO have eased the transition for her and her workforce. “We do a lot with our staff in terms of having open forums to provide them with information about what we think is coming next in the industry,” she said. “We try to help them understand how the work we do fits into the regional, statewide and national landscape.”
She fosters an open workspace that allows her staff to feel comfortable sharing their ideas. “My role is two-fold—it’s providing information, and then being open to feedback and input from our staff, the incredibly smart people who work with us—all ideas are welcome.’”
Her leadership style is aimed toward HealtheConnections being an employer of choice. “We hope to be able to attract and retain top talent, which is something we’re very proud of,” she said. “We’ve added 6-8 staff members in 2025 and have a few more openings in early 2026. We’re 55 in total. I’m lucky to be surrounded by excellent coworkers with deep expertise.”
Employees at HealtheConnections work in such titles as technical/programmer, customer service, data quality, public health, and compliance and policy. “That’s very important,” Amato said of the latter, “and we put a lot of effort and emphasis on that. Without it, we can’t operate.”
Amato is especially honed-in on organizational resiliency and adaptability. “That’s been the biggest focus of my leadership thus far because this is a time of great change, not just for HIEs but for all businesses, and certainly those in the healthcare space. My job is making sure we’ve got a mindset that is focused on adapting and adjusting where possible. And we will be better off for it.”
“Even before my time here, innovation, continuous improvement, and close collaboration with participants, partners, and peers have been the hallmarks of HealtheConnections’ success. Things are changing every day, and the best way we can prepare for the future is being an organization that keeps those at the forefront,” she emphasized. “That’s been one of my key priorities this year
and it’s going to continue. My commitment is to preserve the values that have brought us here, while bringing new ideas and a forward-looking perspective to ensure our organization and partners continue to thrive.” More information can be found online at healtheconnections.org.
As Central New York stands on the edge of historic investment and transformation, TDO is sharpening its focus on what comes next. As the region’s Manufacturing Extension Partnership (MEP) center and a nonprofit consulting and training organization based in Liverpool, TDO exists to grow the local economy by helping manufacturers and technology companies drive operational excellence and cultural transformation.
For the past 35 years, construction industry Association executives, myself included, and others have attempted to work with politicians in Albany to reform the antiquated New York State “Scaffold Law” (Labor Law 240), which imposes an absolute liability standard on gravity related injuries to workers – even when the worker is at fault. Generally, these cases are settled out of court between the plaintiff’s attorney and the very few insurance carriers which choose to take on this extraordinary risk exposure in New York. This unique and strict absolute liability standard does not exist in any of the other 49 states, where such gravity related injury claims and lawsuits are subject to a comparative negligence standard. The construction industry’s proposed reform does not take away one’s ability to sue if injured, rather the industry has for decades asked Albany politicians to amend the state’s outdated Labor Law, which was enacted in 1885, to eliminate the absolute liability standard and replace it with a comparative negligence standard.
Planning strategy today requires holding steady while priorities continually shift. The answer to “What matters most?” often depends on where you sit within the health system. This brief overview blends both system- level and clinician perspectives.
A native of Rhode Island, Steven Hanks, MD, has a substantial family lineage of first responders – both his father and grandfather were firefighters. Dr. Hanks developed a different yet related passion, however, and when he decided to follow that passion to study medicine, he took the tradition of his family line in a new direction.
In his role, Dr. Hanks is responsible for over 20 different organizations within Trinity Health, including hospitals, nursing homes, assisted living facilities, large physician practices, urgent care centers and more. He shared that one of the reasons he’s an effective leader is because he is often present at many different locations within the healthcare network, and he values open communication from all of his colleagues.
Exciting innovations and new accreditations at both SPHP and St. Joseph’s Health have been a focus of Dr. Hanks’ efforts as President and CEO, and they are further evidence of his effective manner of leadership. Specifically at St. Joseph’s Health, which has long been at the forefront of robotic surgery, the recent acquisition of the DV5, a next-generation, multiport surgical robot, has brought even more advancements to the technologies the hospital offers to its patients. The first healthcare system in the Syracuse area to fully embrace robotics, as Dr. Hanks explained, St. Joseph’s offers a full array of robotic approaches, including all generations of the Da Vinci robot, the Xi, and now the DV5.
“One of the things I’ve always insisted on is if we’re going to offer a service, like hernia surgery, I want to provide it at the highest possible level. And so, for areas where there are existing accreditations available, I like to push our organization to seek those accreditations, and that’s exactly what happened with our Center of Excellence for hernia surgery at St. Joseph’s. We’ve met rigorous standards for outcomes, safety, patient satisfaction, and continuous improvement of our quality. For patients, this means they can be confident in the care they’re receiving when they seek hernia care at St. Joseph’s Health. Hernias can be very complex and difficult to care for. We have a variety of approaches that we’ve brought together under the Center of Excellence that allow us to offer many options for patients with the best outcomes in the safest delivery of care possible.”
speaking with a patient, and it creates a note. Now, the doctor or PA no longer needs to either dictate or type the note. This process decreases the amount of time the provider spends on documentation, so they can see more patients and spend more time face-to-face with patients. These are exciting things that are happening, which directly help us improve the experience of and care for our patients.”
“At Trinity, we’re already investing in these trends,” he stated. “We’ve deployed virtual nursing, and we’re leveraging telehealth for virtual visits with our physicians, including our specialists. We’re growing our home-based services, our value-based care models, and our population health models. We’re reimagining how we support the workforce of the future.
Along with such changes, there will certainly be many challenges, as Dr. Hanks pointed out. These challenges include cuts to government funding, increasing government payer and decreasing private payer models, an aging population with higher healthcare needs, and more centralization of super subspecialities leading to a need for patients to travel longer distances for highly specialized care. To confront these challenges head-on, Dr. Hanks emphasized the need for transparent communication and collaboration across the entire healthcare system and beyond.
With Dr. Hanks at the helm, the providers, staff, and patients at St. Joseph’s Health and SPHP can rest assured the organization will tackle the coming changes and challenges by staying true to its foundational mission.
We are witnessing what some are calling “generational change” in our region. Like most leaders, I view change as both inevitable and largely positive. But while change brings new opportunities, we also understand that it brings new challenges and risks. As leaders, we are compelled to consider how change will impact our communities and our companies. One way to manage through change is by playing out scenarios. Scenario planning enables you to prepare for multiple plausible futures by identifying key uncertainties, mapping out strategic responses, and monitoring leading indicators. Bringing together teams to play out scenarios allows for more creative thinking and development of solutions that anticipate challenges and smooth out volatility and risk.