Shawna Butler

Shawna Butler

Nurse Economist, NextMed Health | SEE YOU NOW podcast

Shawna is a nurse economist, digital health catalyst, and creator and host of SEE YOU NOW, a storytelling podcast produced in partnership with Johnson & Johnson and the American Nurses Association featuring the human-centered solutions driven by nurses to solve our most challenging healthcare problems and transform our healthcare systems and practices. Shawna has been a path-breaking role model and champion for advancing nurses as innovators, subject matter experts, and leaders. She centers her work on raising the visibility of nurses, empowering them as system-level change agents, and revealing how they create and drive clinical and economic value. Several years ago, she initiated a global conversation highlighting the rarity of nurses in boardrooms, product design, innovation teams, policy development, tech conferences, and health media. She’s on a mission to change that. 

Notably, Shawna is the managing director of the NextMed.Health conference working with the early adopters in the thick of integrating robotics, 3D printing, drones, AI, blended reality, voice

recognition, digital humans, big data and sensors into our health solutions and lifestyles to improve health, access, experience, and outcomes. She’s also the Director of Experience for the Digital Orthopaedics Conference San Francisco (DOCSF) produced in conjunction with the UCSF Department of Orthopaedic Surgery. 

Her various roles have taken her across the world and given her an unusually broad understanding of health systems and the impact technology and policy have on the many dimensions of a population’s health. Shawna understands instinctively the need to work cross-sector and upstream to improve health experience and outcomes and has done so throughout her career by working with city planners, musicians, arts organizations, chefs, farmers, schools, home builders, philanthropists, investors, inventors, rebels, legends, and anyone with a conviction to improve health and our shared human experience. 

As an extension of her unusual combination of career experiences, Shawna brings to each project an ability to rapidly build rapport and engage knowledgeably across domains with a wide range of experts. Her advanced set of critical care skills and media producing roles have granted her frontline access to patients, hospital rooms, clinics, care teams, and health systems around the world. These intense, hands-on clinical experiences and up-close comparison of care delivery domestically and internationally has revealed the complexity, constraints, creativity, and variation in how healthcare is resourced, organized, delivered, how much it costs, and how well—or not—it performs. 

Shawna is an active member of the Texas Medical Reserves and serves as an advisor to a variety of local, national, and global initiatives including White House Health Equity Roundtable, JLabs Quick Fire Challenge, Food+City, End Well Project, Dutch Health Innovation School, SXSW Pitch Competition, Anthem External Digital Advisory Board, Smith+ Nephew, and the American Health Information Management Association (AHIMA) International Advisory Board. She has shared her work, ideas, and calls for action at major conferences including SXSW, the Biden Cancer Summit, Aspen Ideas Festival, XPRIZE, HIMSS Europe and more. In 2021, she was honored as a Top 50 in Digital Health which recognizes exceptional digital health leaders who are making healthcare massively better for all. Be sure to say hello to her @ShawnaButlerRN. She’d love to hear and share your story!