Dr. Jeanne Armstrong has spent 27 years in healthcare IT, hands-on with electronic records before most physicians had ever seen one. Today she is Chief Medical Officer for the TouchWorks business unit at Altera Digital Health, bringing two decades of family medicine practice to the role. In part one of our conversation, she shares how she got here and what a self-described jack-of-all-trades truly does within the healthcare IT world.

Natalia White: It’s great to sit down with you today Dr. Armstrong. We’ve worked together a lot for the past few years, but I want to hear more from your perspective. What inspired you to pursue a career in healthcare technology?

Dr. Jeanne Armstrong: I was fortunate. My medical school had one of the earliest computerized record systems in the country, and as a med student I hand-typed discharge summaries into it. Then in 1999, as a resident, our program went live on its first EHR. As I was finishing residency, they asked if I would help train the new residents. I was working urgent care and ER shifts, I had loans to pay off, and they were paying me to teach what I knew. That’s when I got the bug. The real answer, though, is that I eventually felt I had done what I could as an end user and a trainer, and I wanted to be closer to where the software is made. Primary care physicians say the system was obviously designed by specialists. Specialists say it was obviously designed by primary care. I wanted to help shape a product my colleagues, my patients and my community would rely on.

Deciding to go full-time in IT and part-time in practice took me more than a year. At one point, one of my partners said, “Look, I can’t do what you do. You have an obligation to help your colleagues and your patients.” People assume physicians go into healthcare IT because practicing wasn’t their thing. I love caring for patients. It may sound cliché, but caring for people when they’re at their most vulnerable, or helping them build new habits and prevent disease, is a great honor, and it’s fun. But I also felt a responsibility to use what I knew to make the EHR safer and more usable for them.

Natalia: I see how your love of patients and technology is a perfect fit for your role. I’m curious, what has kept you passionate about the industry over the years?

Dr. Armstrong: The same thing that got me into it: wanting the best, most efficient tool to use. My husband is a car guy, so I use a lot of car analogies. Early EHRs were the Model T. They got you there, but you cranked the engine yourself and did all the work. Where we’re headed is the modern car that warns you about the vehicle in your blind spot. When I joined TouchWorks, I said I’d give it two years, and if I couldn’t make change, I’d leave. That was 14 years ago. I stayed because I could see the change we were making together.
What keeps me going is a simple belief that we can do better as an industry. Healthcare technology has come a long way, and the tools keep getting better, so we can take on problems that used to feel out of reach. That means technology that genuinely improves the health of our patients, our communities and our families, without turning the physician into a data entry clerk.

Natalia: Now, regarding your work with the TouchWorks team, can you describe your current role and the key initiatives you’re focused on today?

Dr. Armstrong: My title is Chief Medical Officer for our business unit, and at its core my job is bringing the clinical lens to everything we build. I’m also a bit of a jack-of-all-trades. I step in wherever help is needed, and as a family medicine doctor, I like that breadth. I help lead our feature feedback series, bridging what physicians are asking for, what the business needs and what development builds. And I love digging into the product. I create clinical scenarios, test workflows and still go on site with clients. I tend to treat our software the way I’d treat a patient: take a good history, look at what’s actually happening, figure out what it needs and follow up to see if the treatment worked. When I need a consult, our engineers, architects, UX designers and client teams are my specialists, and I learn from them constantly. It’s team-based care.

A big focus right now, like everywhere in healthcare, is AI. We’re starting to see what it can really do, and it’s changing how we plan and approach complex problems in ways that didn’t seem feasible five years ago. In development, we’ve moved from using AI to learn, to helping write code, to AI-directed development with a human in the loop. We’re deliberate about it and use AI where it adds real value, not everywhere. I’ve also spent time on site evaluating ambient listening scribes alongside our TouchWorks Note+ offering. Most clinicians want a hybrid: a visit that feels like a conversation and a note that still produces reportable data. Bringing those together well is harder than it sounds.
I also spend a lot of time keeping up with medicine, because guideline and billing changes land directly in documentation. Right now that’s OB. ACOG’s 2025 PATH guidance moved prenatal care toward visits tailored to each patient, and in 2027 global maternity billing goes away, so each prenatal visit has to stand on its own in the documentation.