Zelcha Emmanuel has been in health system security since 2001 — longer than most people in the industry have been paying attention to it. She started at IBM in 2001, where she built her foundation in enterprise IT. In 2002 she became a Meditech Security Analyst — one of her earliest EMR security roles, at a time when most of the industry had never heard the term EHR. By the time Epic became the dominant platform in healthcare, she was already a seasoned health system security professional. She went on to build, manage, and secure the provisioning infrastructure for Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Kaiser Permanente, Cleveland Clinic, Piedmont, NYC Health + Hospitals, Wellstar, Ascension Technology, and Trinity Health, and among others — holding Epic certifications across Security Coordination, Data Courier Administration, Provider Administration, Cogito Tools Administration, Grand Central, and Prelude — with Cadence currently in progress.
By the time Epic became the dominant platform in healthcare, Zelcha was already a seasoned health system security professional. She went on to build and secure the provisioning infrastructure at Children's Healthcare of Atlanta, Kaiser Permanente, Cleveland Clinic, Piedmont, NYC Health + Hospitals, Wellstar, Ascension Technology, and Trinity Health — holding Epic certifications across Security Coordination, Data Courier Administration, Provider Administration, Cogito Tools Administration, Grand Central, and Prelude — with Cadence currently in progress. Then, in September 2018, everything stopped. She survived a brain aneurysm. What followed would have caused most people to slow down. Zelcha did not slow down. She kept working through recovery — because that is who she is.
"I went from a medical records clerk to founding three companies. Every path I coach — I've walked it."
The pivot came from clarity, not crisis. After 23 years of watching health systems struggle to find qualified Healthcare Cybersecurity and Epic Security talent — and watching talented professionals get placed in the wrong roles by firms that didn't understand the difference between an Epic Security Coordinator and an application analyst — Zelcha decided to stop observing the gap and start closing it. zeHEALTHTECH was founded on a simple premise: the staffing firm placing Epic and healthcare IT talent should be run by someone who has actually done the job.
That premise has sharpened even further as the healthcare industry accelerates into AI adoption and as Healthcare Cybersecurity becomes one of the most critical — and most understaffed — disciplines in modern care delivery. The tools being built to transform care delivery — ambient documentation, predictive analytics, AI-powered clinical workflows — only function inside health systems when the underlying IT infrastructure is staffed correctly. Healthcare Cybersecurity, Epic Security, identity governance, and AI system security are not back-office functions. They are the foundation everything else runs on. Zelcha built zeHEALTHTECH to be the firm that understands this — and places the talent accordingly.
Today, Zelcha continues to practice what she places. She works as an Epic Security Analyst at while running zeHEALTHTECH and its parent company, Amplifaiy. She hosts the Digital Dose Podcast, where she interviews founders and operators at the intersection of healthcare and AI. She has developed a specialized Epic provisioning service designed to eliminate the most persistent post-go-live provisioning gaps that health systems manage manually today. And she co-founded With Us Sober Living, a community recovery resource in Gwinnett County, Georgia — because her commitment to building things that matter does not stop at healthcare IT.
She is not a recruiter who found Epic on a job board. She is the person your Epic Security team calls when something is broken — and the person who built a firm so that health systems and IT professionals never have to settle for a match that doesn't understand the work.