Upon recognizing significant unmet needs and challenges in patients’ experiences throughout their cancer diagnosis, Dr. Grace Cordovano founded her patient advocacy practice, Enlightening Results, in 2010. As the culmination of her life’s experiential learning and education, Dr. Cordovano is dedicated to fostering personalized patient advocacy services, specializing in the oncology space. She strategically guides patients from point of diagnosis through survivorship or end-of-life care planning with empathy, ensuring they are armed with the most pertinent, medically credible, easy to understand information and tools to make empowered decisions about their care. Through her advocacy work, she is humbled to witness first-hand the unmet needs and barriers to access, the grief, the joys, the suffering, the financial toxicities, and the losses patients face in the midst of a diagnosis. She has made these insights actionable as a patient experience enhancer.
Dr. Cordovano is a firm believer in the continuous advancement of patient education, engagement, empowerment, and experiences through the infusion of empathy, design thinking, technology, and compassionate business strategy. As a nationally recognized patient opinion leader, she amplifies the patient and carepartner’s voice in discussions on maximizing accessible innovation, digital transformation, fostering inclusivity, improving patient outcomes, and the culture of life-focused care.
Dr. Cordovano is passionate about leveraging digital technology, innovation, and social media to deliver critical, credible information that resonates with patients, that is crafted in a culturally sensitive manner at an appropriate health literacy. She’s a champion for the use of digital tech and social media to bridge gaps in informational silos and fallout from poor interoperability and fragmented coordination of care. She firmly believes that ideation, implementation, and mass adoption of digital tech must happen through the lens of empathy, co-designed in partnership with patients and carepartners. Dr. Cordovano collaborated with the American Medical Association on their Digital Health Implementation Playbook to ensure implementation strategies are inclusive of understanding the lay patient’s and carepartner’s experience, health literacy, values, preferences, and needs.
With over 20 years of advocacy experience, Dr. Cordovano is a boots-on-the-ground HIPAA warrior, data access champion, knowledge seeker, and transparency hunter. She co-founded Unblock Health to empower patients and their carepartners to hold the ecosystem accountable, arming them to fight back against information blocking and patient access barriers where they are in their local communities.
Dr. Cordovano completed her Masters and Ph.D. in Biochemistry of metabolic disease at Albert Einstein College of Medicine (Bronx, NY). She is a board-certified patient advocate via the international credentialing of the Patient Advocate Certification Board. She has been repeatedly recognized as Patient Advocate of the Year, most recently at the 2019 Health IT and Marketing & PR Community Conference Medigy Awards. She has been featured in StatNews, KevinMD, Tincture, The Healthcare Blog, US News & World Report, Kaiser News, etc.
Follow her on Twitter at @GraceCordovano.