Meet Dr. Tammie Adomako, Hologic’s New Medical Safety Officer

Dr. Tammie Adomako still brings an OB-GYN’s mindset from the exam room — she’s simply scaled it to Hologic’s global platform, where her focus on safety and quality in medical device innovation helps safeguard millions of women.

Dr. Adomako spent many years in clinical practice followed by more than a decade leading global patient safety and medical affairs at major pharmaceutical and medtech companies. Now, as Senior Director and Medical Safety Officer at Hologic, she leads efforts to build quality and safety into every stage of a product’s life.

Throughout her career, Dr. Adomako’s focus hasn’t changed.

“The patient is at the center of every decision,” she says. “Whether I’m bedside with a woman in labor, at a design review or a global safety meeting — that mindset is the same.”

A career built around women’s health

As a clinician, Dr. Adomako cared for women through some of the most significant and vulnerable moments of their lives. She often thought not only about the woman in front of her, but about her entire family.

“Women are so often the backbones and caretakers of families,” she explains. “If the woman is not doing well, the family is not doing well.”

These experiences shaped how Dr. Adomako thinks about quality today. Every decision that is made about a product or technology can influence whether a provider can perform a procedure safely. It can also be the difference between catching a precancerous lesion early or missing it. To her, that is what “quality” means in real terms: equipment and technology that consistently support the best possible care.

At Hologic, she and her team use that insight to help shape how products are developed, tested, monitored and improved.

From design to delivery: How safety is built Into every product

Dr. Adomako’s career has always centered on women, and she has seen firsthand how early detection, supported by safe and reliable technology, can change the course of a woman’s life.

That perspective also shapes how she coaches teams. When someone is working on a risk assessment or a product evaluation, she encourages them to connect that task to the real person at the end of the process.

“When you link it back to patient impact, quality expands beyond being a requirement and becomes a mindset,” says Dr. Adomako, adding that since joining Hologic, she’s been inspired by how often she hears that same thinking from colleagues.

“I’ve been in meetings where people say, ‘If this were my mother or my sister, this is what I would want,’” she says. “They really mean it. That level of commitment to women’s health inspires me.”

For Dr. Adomako, discussions around patient safety in medical devices must take place at the very beginning of the design process. That means working with engineers and R&D from the point of development design on paper to identify potential issues, then keeping that risk assessment going through validation, verification and into long-term monitoring after a product becomes commercially available. 

How to design for a complex, global patient population

Clinical standards can vary from country to country — and even across regions within a country. As a former clinician, Dr. Adomako thinks in terms of “standards of care” and knows every patient is different, and so is their care. 

She offers a simple example: two pregnant patients with similar symptoms — one working at a desk on Wall Street, another working long days in the fields in the U.S. Midwest. Both must be treated within national medical guidelines, but their daily lives and risks vary, and their care must reflect that. 

Now, she has expanded that thinking to a global scale in her role focused on quality at Hologic.

“We can’t evaluate provider feedback from Asia based only on U.S. practice,” she explains. “We have to understand the local standard of care and the local regulations. Then we build company processes that can meet all those needs.”

This balance — a strong, consistent core with room for local requirements — is critical to maintaining quality and compliance worldwide, according to Dr. Adomako.

Quality in an era of AI and automation

As technology advances and AI and automation transform healthcare and manufacturing, pressure builds to move faster. For Dr. Adomako, speed cannot come at the expense of patient safety.

She believes the answer is close partnership between medical, engineering and data teams, including real-time analysis of how AI-enabled products are performing in the real world — not just in clinical trials.

“We have to ask: Are these tools improving diagnostic accuracy? Are they causing any unintended problems? If we work together, we can move fast to correct any issues while upholding the highest safety standards.”

Real world evidence will only grow more important, she adds. It is how regulators, companies and clinicians will judge whether innovation is truly helping patients.

Coming full circle

For Dr. Adomako, joining Hologic has felt like a return to her roots.

“It feels like coming full circle back to women’s health, but in a way that lets me protect many more patients than I could in one practice,” she says.

From the exam room to the engineering lab, her message is the same: Quality is about people. It is ultimately about the clinician and the patient, and the trust that the device or test in front of them is reliable and worthy of playing a role in potentially life-changing decisions.

At Hologic, leaders like Dr. Tammie Adomako are helping ensure that trust is well placed.