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Join host Cynthia Kirkpatrick in a deeply inspiring conversation with Sylvia Owens, the Director IT Revenue Cycle Systems at BJC Healthcare. With over 27 years of experience in healthcare, 18 of them in IT, Sylvia shares her incredible journey from growing up in East St. Louis to playing professional basketball in Europe and eventually transitioning into a leadership role in healthcare technology. Sylvia’s story is one of resilience, reinvention, and the power of hard work.
In this episode, we dive into:
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About Our Guest: Sylvia Owens is the Director of IT at BJC Healthcare, where she focuses on software change management and business process design. She has an 18-year background in healthcare IT, implementing Epic electronic health records across large healthcare systems. Before transitioning into healthcare, Sylvia played professional basketball in Europe and has continuously demonstrated courage and resilience throughout her life.
🏀 Sylvia’s Background and Career (00:00 – 09:41)
🎓 Education and Early Career (09:41 – 19:01)
💻 IT Career in Healthcare (19:01 – 27:32)
👥 Leadership Philosophy (27:32 – 35:14)
🌟 Overcoming Challenges (35:15 – 47:06)
🚀 Advice for Success (47:07 – 56:47)
🌈 Personal Growth and Inspiration (56:47 – 01:06:16)
🤝 Mentorship and Giving Back (01:06:16 – 01:17:00)
Content Notice
This podcast and all She Lift Project content represents the opinions of Cynthia Kirkpatrick and her guests. The content here is for informational purposes only, and should not be taken as professional advice – financial, legal, medical, or otherwise.
Views and opinions expressed in the podcast and across all She Lift Project media channels are our own and do not represent that of our places of work. While we make every effort to ensure that the information we are sharing is accurate, we welcome any comments, suggestions, or correction of errors.

“Everybody has a light inside of them, and you have a choice. You can either use lighter fluid or an extinguisher. Same thing goes with everything. Same with people’s talents. You can either light it up or you can extinguish it.”

“If you follow this methodology, if you follow the pattern, the outcome is inevitable. You cannot mess it up because it’s just calculated moves that are in writing.”

One of the things I love to do if the opportunity presents itself as coach people, because I feel like that is the most, wow, fun, enriching thing that you can do for people. Because what happens is I believe that people behave for reasons, and you got to figure out what’s the root cause. So if someone reacts in a certain way, whether it’s anger, emotion, or whatever, there’s a reason why they’re reacting that way. And so I don’t think that people really want to react that way. They want to be their best self.

“I didn’t go into business from a business school background, and so I discounted a lot of my intuition and what I thought was right and what I should be doing and took other people’s advice sort of over my own thinking and eventually I always would wind up back to sort of what felt right to me was very different from the advice that I had been given in the business community.”

“The experience of going through the legal process is supposed to be about seeking justice. More often than not, people go through it and they’re just as scared and almost re-traumatized as they were when the injustice happened.”
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