Organisations adopt and embrace new technology for a whole host of reasons.
It could be the cost element or to increase efficiency, but to healthcare firms such as Avellino, the stakes don’t come any higher. Avellino, armed with 15 years of experience in genomic analytics, is leveraging advancements in artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms to identify individuals who are at risk of developing a disease in the future, before traditional clinical symptoms of the disease are detected. This technology-enabled expertise places Avellino at the forefront of a paradigm shift in healthcare, where deep-learning algorithms are driving the personalisation of medicine.
Technology in health sciences
As technology plays an increasingly influential role in health sciences, embracing new processes and systems can help improve quality of life for millions. Avellino’s data analytics platform is the foundation of an ecosystem of technologies and services that researchers, physicians, and the healthcare community rely on to drive innovation in personalised diagnostics, treatments and cures.
Nancy Selph is currently the Head of Information Technology at Avellino and has been with the organisation since February 2022 after joining from Wells Fargo. She is passionate about the outcome rather than the technology itself and is keen to stress the solution has to make a profound difference.
“It’s a balance between getting something done quickly and ensuring that it’s done right with an eye towards creating scalable, sustainable, agile and secure services based on industry standards,” affirms Selph. “As an emerging company, I am always mindful of our maturity level. It’s about building and integrating technologies for where we are today with a pathway to the future. There’s also the decision about buy versus build. I look to build the technologies which give us a competitive advantage and be smart about the commodity technologies that I purchase.”
Leadership evolution
Being a leader is not just about simply telling people what to do – if it was, everyone would be successful. By her own admission, Selph learned the hard way on the improvements she needed to make to her own leadership style to do better for her team. After taking a four-year hiatus from work to look after her son, she joined Merrill Lynch in 2003 as Vice President of Market Data Infrastructure Operations – but it was far from smooth sailing.
“When I look back at the experience, I think I didn’t treat my team like people. I was barking orders at them,” she recalls. “It was probably about eight months in when everything was falling apart. No one was doing their work, and I didn’t know what was going on. I pulled one of the guys aside and said, ‘What is up? Why aren’t you guys working?’ And he just blasted me. He said, ‘You just sit in your office and you don’t talk to us or treat us as people’.
