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Pamela Wirth Barnhill learned two important things as a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon: how to be a good problem solver, and how to embrace technology.

Those lessons have been guiding forces in her career ever since.

Pamela is an accomplished operations executive with more than 25 years of experience leading and scaling Fortune 500, midsize and startup companies. She鈥檚 also an entrepreneur and author whose own startup, Hello Health, uses artificial intelligence and personalization to help people live their healthiest, happiest lives.

鈥淢y kids will say, 鈥榃hat do you do for a living?鈥� And I say, 鈥榃ell, I solve problems,鈥欌�� Pamela says. 鈥淢ost of those problems are created by people, whether customers, clients, employees, bosses. Most of it comes from something that they need to have done, but it needs to be not only solved but communicated. And so I definitely find a big need in problem solving, resolution, how to manage through conflict.鈥�

Pamela received an MBA in operations and technology from the Tepper School of Business in 2001. She then worked in consulting before joining her family鈥檚 business, InnSuites Hospitality Trust, in 2003.

鈥淭he company had gone public, so it wasn't quite as easy as just joining the company,鈥� Pamela says. 鈥淚 had to go through all the board interviews and the approval process, and they wanted me to really prove myself.鈥�

She did just that, starting as the general manager of one hotel, then two, and then moving into various leadership roles until she became chief operating officer and president. As COO and president, she oversaw the ownership group and the management company. She also leaned into her CMU roots and started an e-commerce division, which she scaled to include 6,000 hotels in 18 countries. The division was eventually sold and, after staying with the buyer for about a year, Pamela decided to try something new.

鈥淚 started doing my own consulting, thinking 鈥業 can probably do this on my own just fine,鈥欌�� Pamela says. 鈥淎nd it was fine, except that it's really hard to sell and do at the same time. And so since then, I've been kind of bouncing back and forth between fractional COO roles and full-time COO roles.鈥�

While Pamela was using her problem-solving skills to scale the hospitality company, another problem presented itself: her son鈥檚 health.

鈥淲hile I was running the publicly traded company, one of my kids became really sick and was misdiagnosed with autism and an autoimmune disorder,鈥� she says. 鈥淚t didn't feel right.鈥�

Not trusting the diagnoses, Pamela sought answers. She found a neurologist who ran bloodwork and identified the cause of her son鈥檚 symptoms. He was low in vitamins D3 and B12, carried a gene variant that didn鈥檛 allow him to properly absorb folate called MTHFR, and was fighting two viral and bacterial infections 鈥� CMV and Strep.

鈥淭he doctor said, 鈥楲ook, I'm going to teach you how to make supplements at home that'll cross the blood-brain barrier, get rid of this infection. We're going to treat the infection both with Western and Eastern medicine. He's going to be fine, but give me a year,鈥欌�� Pamela says. 鈥淪o sure enough, a year passed, he popped back, and that's about 20 years ago. He鈥檚 fine.鈥�

Her family鈥檚 experience served as the inspiration for Hello Health, which offers cost-effective lab testing and supplements, as well as the Hello Health podcast and her books, 鈥淗ello Health鈥� and 鈥淪aving My Son.鈥�

To balance it all, Pamela leans into her operations experience and data-driven leadership style.

鈥淚 really like to use data, I like to be collaborative and I like to encourage people to come with solutions,鈥� she says. 鈥淪o whenever they say, 鈥楬ey, we've got a problem,鈥� I'm always encouraging people to say, 鈥楬ey, well, what would you suggest? How would you challenge this or potentially solve it?鈥欌��

Pamela is also leaning into technology to scale Hello Health. She is currently working with an engineering team and patent attorneys to bring additional personalized AI solutions to integrative and functional health and wellness.

鈥淲hat I'm doing is creating the AI platform in a different entity, so then Hello Health can be its first customer,鈥� she says. 鈥淪o I鈥檓 separating out the technology itself from the supplements and the lab testing, keeping the physical products separate from the technology.鈥�

Together with Hello Health, Pamela hopes the new platform will help her get one step closer to solving another big problem: making health accessible and affordable for all.