Founder of OnlyMyBloom | Healthcare Technology Executive | Product Leader | Communications Specialist | Market Research Analyst
The technology changing how care is delivered is also changing who gets to build it.
Somewhere in the requirements document of nearly every clinical product ever shipped, there lives an imaginary nurse. She is rested. She is caring for one patient. She reads every alert carefully, in order, and she never once mistakes a warning for the fourth false alarm of the shift. She does not exist, and in a Pediatric Intensive Care Unit (PICU) at 2am, the gap between her and the actual human standing at the bedside is where children get hurt.
Julie Odejoke-Maxwell spent years in bedside nursing. She learned there that a child rarely crashes in a single vital sign. Deterioration arrives as a pattern, three or four small changes that mean nothing alone and everything together. Then she spent another two decades in medical devices and healthcare software watching products clear every review and still create risk, because nobody in the room had asked what happens to the person on the other end when everything goes wrong.
Her verdict on that habit is the least diplomatic sentence in her vocabulary, and the truest. “If your product’s safety model assumes a perfect user who never gets tired, never gets distracted, and never misreads an alert, you haven’t built a safety model. You’ve built a hope.”
A Registered Nurse With a Product Roadmap
Julie has spent 28 years in healthcare and healthcare technology. She is now the founder of OnlyMyBloom – a women’s health platform launched in March, 2026. She is also, still and always, a registered nurse, board-certified in Nursing Informatics. What defines her is not the combination of those things but the order of them: she learned to read people first and identify patterns second. Everything she has built since is downstream of that.
Twenty-Eight Years of Being Taught by People Who Knew More
She began in the PICU at Duke University Medical Center, a starting point almost nobody in health tech shares. Ask her where her clinical judgment came from and she refuses to take the credit. She will simply tell you it came from senior nurses who could read a room before the monitors caught up, from pharmacists who understood drug interactions at a depth she says she will never reach, from attending physicians who taught her to think several steps ahead of the moment in front of her. “I didn’t figure that out on my own. I learned it from those experts at the bedside that were willing to invest their time to help me learn.”
That is an unusual thing for an executive to say about their own expertise, and it explains the career that followed. When she moved into the industry, first as a senior software product manager at CareFusion – the Cardinal Health spinoff that BD later acquired – then as an independent consultant, she was not the person with the answers. She was the person with the questions. The questions were always the same, and always slightly inconvenient. This works on paper. What happens when a nurse is three patients deep at two in the morning and this alert fires?
She served as adjunct faculty at Northern Virginia Community College (NVCC) in between, which sharpened a different instinct: how to make complicated things feel understandable instead of intimidating. “People don’t just need information. They need to feel understood.” Nursing, product strategy, teaching, writing. Four vocabularies, one obsession. Understand the person behind the problem, and the pattern they are living inside of.
The Question She Could Not Put Down
OnlyMyBloom did not begin as a product idea. It began as an irritation she could not resolve after years of sitting with patients and families. Why does a woman so often know something is changing in her body long before the healthcare system can tell her what it is?
Her diagnosis of the gap is structural, not medical. Women experience their health as one continuous story. The system evaluates them as a sequence of disconnected encounters, isolated symptoms, separate diagnoses, none of which are permitted to speak to each other. “A woman might know something is changing in her body for years before the system can connect the dots.”
The obvious response would have been another tracker. Another place to log symptoms, another dashboard, another quiet request for more data from women who have already handed over plenty. She rejected that, and her reason has become something close to a personal doctrine.
“The right philosophy isn’t ‘If you build it, they will come.’ It’s this: if we truly understand it, we can build something worth coming to.”
So OnlyMyBloom was built to reflect rather than collect. It maps cycle, symptoms, mood, energy, and sleep against hormonal phase, with a particular focus on perimenopause, the stage of life where women are most consistently told that what they are feeling is normal. It returns daily guidance on nutrition, movement, supplements, and self-care. Crucially, it generates a health report a woman can hand to her physician, which turns a vague conversation into evidence.
OnlyMyBloom shipped on the app stores in twenty-seven languages, with a provider dashboard and clinic management layer already standing. An inaugural official European partnership launched in September this year, and conversations with partners throughout Asia are already underway. This raises a question of how a career Clinician moves this fast. Her answer is where she becomes genuinely contrarian.
She Has Watched This Room Get Scared Twice Before
She was in the PICU when hospitals abandoned rigid visiting hours for family-centered care. The resistance was fierce. Parents at the bedside around the clock were called a hindrance, a distraction, an invitation for amateurs to interfere. Collaborative care then produced markedly better outcomes.
She was in software when teams were dragged from waterfall to agile, insisting they needed every requirement upfront or nothing could be architected at all. The loudest objectors were the ones most invested in the old way. Now she watches healthcare argue about AI and recognizes the expression on everyone’s face. “I see the same fear and hesitation in the eyes that I saw when family-centered care was proposed, and when the agile approach was introduced.”
Her position is not that the worry is silly. She thinks the sequencing is backwards. Organizations ask what AI can do for them instead of naming the clinical problem first, then wonder why the impressive thing they built goes unused. The question that separates a pilot from production is not whether the model performs. It is what happens when the model is wrong: does the clinician catch it, and does the system fail safely if they don’t? “We need to build working software that solves real healthcare problems.”
What the Imaginary Nurse Was Never Going to Catch
The phantom user in the requirements document was always a convenience – to the teams shipping without asking what happens to a tired human at 2am, and to a healthcare system that told women for years that a pattern she could feel was not yet a pattern the system could identify. Julie never accepted that fiction. She was the one in the room asking the questions it was built to avoid – what happens at 2 a.m., what happens when the model is wrong, what about the woman who knew first. She built for the exhausted clinician, then for the woman who knew first, and she did it before the room agreed it was time.
The imaginary nurse never existed. The exhausted nurse at the bedside does, and so does the woman who knows something is changing in her own body. Julie builds for them, and she is only getting started.
Julie, BSN, RN-BC, is a board-certified nurse informaticist and healthcare technology product leader working at the intersection of clinical care, AI, and product strategy. She is the founder of OnlyMyBloom, a women’s health platform live on the Apple App Store in twenty-seven languages, and builds clinically grounded technology for the people healthcare too often overlooks: exhausted Clinicians, women mid-story, and patients the requirements document never imagined. To connect with Julie, visit onlymybloom.com or https://www.linkedin.com/in/julie-odejoke-maxwell-2767158/
