Commencement

Meagan Sampogna Williams, PhD, MBA, RHIA (BS ‘00) has spent her entire 25-year health care career focused on patient care in every role she has held. From designing and implementing specialty pharmacy systems to fulfill chronic disease prescriptions for clients such as Walgreens, Aetna and Highmark, to working directly with the Food and Drug Administration on behalf of 80+ pharmaceutical manufacturers to navigate drug approvals and development of risk management programs for novel therapies, to operating hundreds of specialty and infusion pharmacies, infusion treatment centers and oncology practices across the nation, she is motivated to connect people, processes and technology to supporting patients with significant health care needs.

She currently serves as the chief operating officer for the U.S. Oncology Network, a business unit of McKesson (a Fortune 9 company) where she is dedicated to bringing innovation to local oncology care in 31 states with over 2,700 providers for over 1.4 million cancer patients annually. Williams has also held executive leadership positions as president and chief operating officer for BioMatrix Specialty Pharmacy and Paragon Healthcare, a CarelonRx Company supporting specialty infusion pharmacy, home infusion clinical care and infusion practice operations on a national scale.

These roles and work opportunities would not have been possible without her SHRS education where she got her first taste of health care operations in student positions held in medical transcription at UPMC and in the pediatric tumor registry at Children’s Hospital. While SHRS project and capstone work can take significant time and effort for students, it paid off for Williams as the required Health Information Management senior capstone project led to her first job in health care technology upon graduation at Creehan & Company, now a part of Inovalon.

In addition to her bachelor of science in health information management, she also earned her MBA from Robert Morris University and holds a PhD in health services and leadership from Walden University.

Williams gives her time extensively to the University of Pittsburgh as an Executive Committee, Awards Committee Chair, and board member of the Pitt Alumni Association, a Board of Visitors member for SHRS, an advisory board member for the Masters of Science Health Informatics program, a Chancellor Circle Member, a Panther Club Member, a Pitt men’s basketball season ticket holder, and a founding sponsor of the Meagan Sampogna Williams Student Resource Fund in SHRS.

Williams also holds a board seat with Life Teen International and has a heart for serving the next generation of leaders in various ways. She resides with her loving husband and two springer spaniel pups in sunny Scottsdale, AZ, where she enjoys her garden, golfing when time allows and serving as a youth and music minister weekly in her church. While she has been west for over 15 years, her vanity Arizona license plate that reads “PITTGAL” is a constant reminder of her roots where she really hails from!