You know how to run a meeting, close a deal, and lead a team. But when it comes to managing your healthcare, even the most accomplished women can feel powerless. This column flips that script. Maggie equips high-achieving women with chronic conditions to lead their health journey like they lead their business. With strategy, clarity, and confidence. Through practical frameworks, communication tools, and real-life scenarios, you’ll learn how to bring your boardroom brilliance into the exam room and advocate for care that actually works for you.
Maggie Teliska
The Professional Patient
Helping ambitious women bring their boardroom skills into the exam room and lead their care with power and precision.
Maggie Teliska is a seasoned utilities professional and heart failure patient who bridges the worlds of industry expertise and lived medical experience. A recognized battery expert in the utilities sector—and in life, with a pacemaker and ICD powering her own heart—Maggie applies the same strategic thinking, problem-solving skills, and resilience from her professional career to managing her health.
She is the co-founder of a private Facebook community for over 33,000 members living with heart conditions, providing peer support and shared knowledge, as well as mybeatgoeson.org, a resource created by heart patients for heart patients to share reliable, lived-experience–based information. As a WomenHeart Champion, Maggie speaks at conferences and events nationwide, bringing the patient voice into conversations about care, research, and policy.
Maggie lives just outside Charleston, South Carolina, with her husband and their stay-at-home cat, Black Cat
