The sixth episode in Tech Alpharetta’s Driving Innovation podcast series explores transformative leadership and technology disruption. Jennifer Sparks, Vacmobile’s co-founder and CEO, shares her thoughts on what it means to be a transformative leader and how listening and problem solving can lead to a major market disruption.
Vacmobile is solving a critical community safety and healthcare need by working to make digital vaccination records accessible across the United States. Its mobile application will obtain digital vaccination records from state registries and enables individuals to digitally transmit those records or have a health pass generated from the app for on-demand proof of vaccinations or negative time-stamped Covid-19 test results. Best of all, Vacmobile’s app will allow users to transmit these vaccination records and Covid-19 test results in real-time from their smart phones.
As a parent, the management of vaccination records was a source of aggravation for Sparks when she moved across the country. The process was antiquated and inefficient, because state immunization registries do not talk to each other.
Following the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic, Sparks was determined to bring these records into the 21st century. She formed Vacmobile™ and filed for a patent for her innovative suite of vaccination records solutions.
Sparks is not a traditional startup entrepreneur. She previously served in marketing and communications roles on executive leadership teams at the New Mexico Public Education Department and University of New Mexico Health Science Center. She also ran her own consulting business assisting large non-profit clients such as the Pew Center for the States, Save the Children and Habitat for Humanity. After recognizing that the lack of a consumer facing digital management systems for vaccination records was a problem that needed to be solved, she set out to fix it herself. She believes that being an entrepreneur and a transformational leader means listening.
“Entrepreneurs are really just solving problems and in order to solve problems, you have to listen,” says Sparks. “I’ve been listening to a lot of discussions about this problem and recognized we needed to solve it. Then the pandemic hit, and it became readily apparent that this wasn’t just nice to have, this was mission critical.”
Listen to learn more about Sparks’ journey to becoming a successful transformational leader.
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