Parisa Vatanka, PharmD

Co-Founder & CEO, Digital.Health

Parisa “Risa” Vatanka, PharmD is Co-Founder & CEO of Digital.Health - on a mission to foster democratization of health care by integrating digitally enabled care at scale. She holds a faculty appointment at the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) School of Pharmacy. Risa is a thought leader with experience creating novel health care delivery solutions from concept to marketplace. Her background includes heading high-visibility initiatives implemented nationwide and globally. Previously, Risa worked at the American Pharmacists Association (APhA) on the corporate alliances team. She led APhA’s digital health strategy, including being founder and chair of the DigitalHealth.Rx Summit and Hackathon. She serves on the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (AACP) digital health advisory committee. Through her volunteer leadership role with the California Pharmacists Association (CPhA), she founded and chaired the first-of-its-kind interprofessional digital health conference (DHX) with a pharmacy-pharmacist focus. Risa was an appointed member of the Digital Medicine Society’s (DiMe) Tour of Duty on driving adoption of The Digital Clinical Measures Playbook where she led development of the Micro-Playbook for Pharmacists.

Risa is a graduate of the University of Kansas, School of Pharmacy. Her professional training includes completing a Post-Graduate Year 1 (PGY1) Pharmacy Practice Residency at UCSF, a PGY2 Administrative Pharmacy Residency at Stanford University, and two externships with the United States Public Health Service (USPHS) Indian Health Service (IHS). Risa is a Certified Tobacco Treatment Specialist (CTTS), trained at the Mayo Clinic Nicotine Dependence Center. These experiences instilled in Risa an appreciation of the tremendous value of an interprofessional approach to patient care to foster health promotion and disease prevention, ultimately contributing to a healthier society.