Veteran tech executive Christina Van Houten, MBA ’96, has a new company aimed at improving healthcare outcomes and costs through an AI-assisted intelligence platform.
- By
- April 30, 2025
- Healthcare
Pursuing a Vision for a Healthier Economy
By the time Christina Van Houten launched healthcare technology company Equity Quotient in 2022, she had decades of experience navigating the world of enterprise tech. But even with an arsenal of skills, kicking off what she calls her “third chapter” in her mid-50s has required conviction and a willingness to effectively start over again.
Van Houten began her career doing public-interest work focused on community and economic development, spending five years at various governmental and nonprofit organizations before enrolling at Booth. As a student, she saw the changes that people in any sector of the economy can effect to improve the social and economic landscape, and her MBA experience broadened her perspectives on where “good” work could happen.
She found her second chapter in her early 30s, in an industry she hadn’t expected: enterprise tech. As her depth of experience grew and she assumed more senior roles in product strategy at companies such as Oracle, IBM, Infor/Koch, and Mimecast, she found herself in a position to build more-diverse teams and fairer compensation models in the pursuit of realizing stronger performance across all dimensions of the business.
I fell into tech in the early days of enterprise software and ended up enjoying the journey—and frankly found more success than I had imagined. That was the late 1990s, and it has turned out to be a long, fulfilling career. Since tech was a pivot for me after my MBA, I was initially intimidated and worried about finding my place, but I was pleasantly surprised that it was a better fit than I anticipated. One of the many things I appreciate about Booth is that it equipped me with a solid framework for navigating change by seeing patterns and opportunities. I had the tools to work across every major solution category in enterprise software and devise strategies for addressing every industry sector and region across the globe.
Looking back, I’m glad I had the patience to endure the initial chaos and uncertainty that seem to plague an organization after an acquisition. I was one of the first employees at a small software company, ProfitLogic, based in Boston, that was acquired by Oracle five years later. Understandably, most of my colleagues’ reactions were “I’m out of here” after they encountered the challenges that came with working inside a large corporate machine. Despite the mass exodus, I decided to stick it out to see if I could thrive in such an ecosystem and ended up spending another five years there. The experience at Oracle provided me with new skills, domain expertise, and relationships that ultimately led me to advance more quickly in my career than if I had exited along with the others.
I’ve always sat between the guys who code and the guys who carry a bag. As a product strategist, I had the opportunity to engage with all aspects of the business: sales and marketing, customer support, engineering, administrative. I really enjoyed supporting the sales team in winning a big deal one day and collaborating with engineers to bring a product vision to life the next. Working with a wide range of personalities and flavors of genius over my career was a gift that taught me the importance of assembling diverse talents, personalities, and perspectives to bring about the best performance.
I was introduced to the idea of portfolio optimization as a first-year student in Investments and realized I could apply it to so many aspects of life. I remember thinking at the time that this concept—of proactively achieving the right mix of diversity in asset allocation to unlock the “efficient frontier” to minimize risk and maximize growth—worked as a broader framework. Over my career, I’ve used it as a critical guiding principle for building teams, for instance. I find that the best teams aren’t composed of a bunch of people who are the same. Rather, they include some who might be acutely talented but more high risk/high reward, and some who are everyday contributors while being lower risk and more reliable—and everyone in between.
“The challenge and opportunity are more urgent in healthcare than anywhere else in our economy.”
— Christina Van Houten
Earlier in my career, I thought it was enough to work hard, get the job done, and produce high-quality deliverables. Over time, I realized all that hard work was for naught if I couldn’t figure out how to get and hold people’s attention and tell a clear and compelling story about why other people should care and why it mattered to them. Booth taught me the importance of combining data analysis with storytelling to achieve the complete package of what’s required to be effective, persuasive, and impactful and to build credibility and trust.
The world changed so much during the pandemic—populations moved, demographics shifted, cities grew and contracted, industries evolved. It seemed to me that with those changes, many companies were flying blind when it came to meeting the needs of their stakeholders, including their workforce, suppliers, customers, and broader communities. Around this time, after three decades and four exits, I found myself with the opportunity to pursue an idea that would become Equity Quotient. I knew it would be a big data platform that could help organizations measure the socioeconomic landscape around them and their role in it. I saw lots of use cases for it—in banking, real estate, manufacturing, distribution, and beyond—but my cofounder and I decided to focus on healthcare, reasoning that the challenge and opportunity are more urgent there than anywhere else in our economy.
I was at a point in my career where I could have been slowing down, but I felt compelled to take everything I’ve learned to create something novel and impactful instead. I was also in a position to bring together so many things that were possible only because I was seasoned. Now that I’m in the proverbial third chapter of my career, I feel grateful to be in this phase of life and able to take advantage of all these experiences that I accumulated over the years.
The United States spends more on healthcare than any other developed country in the world but has by far the worst outcomes. There’s an imperative across the ecosystem of hospital systems, health plans, biotech, and related products and services to reduce the cost of care while improving performance on all relevant dimensions. Achieving the change needed to address this mandate requires capabilities that healthcare leaders currently lack. My hope is that Equity Quotient can help organizations take meaningful steps to overcome this challenge with data, analytical models, and AI-powered automation.
I came to Booth to complement my background in public service with the aim of contributing to a healthy economy. In the end, the experience taught me that the economy is about people—creating an ecosystem of markets that operate effectively to provide the best possible outcomes or quality of life for as many stakeholders as possible in a complex environment. I see Equity Quotient as my way of going full circle—leveraging everything I learned about making products in enterprise tech combined with a vision for how organizations can operate more effectively and with clarity in a world that has become increasingly complex, confusing, and in crisis. I feel fortunate to be at a point in my career and life where I can pursue a vision for a more sustainable system that works better for everyone.
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