Ten Years Later: The Career Choice That Changed My Path

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Ten years ago, I made a career decision that changed far more than my job.

In January 2016, I decided to step away from permanent CIO positions. I wanted more flexibility in my life and wanted to move back near my family – which at the time included three young grandchildren and one more on the way.

My plan was to do interim management, consulting, and coaching- but on my terms and my schedule. Still, I wasn’t quite ready to step off the cliff without knowing what came next. I didn’t leave my permanent position at Michigan Medicine until I had my first interim CIO role lined up at University Hospitals in Cleveland.

It was the transition I needed, both professionally and personally. It gave me the opportunity to try a different way of working while we sold our house, moved back to New England, and bought a home near our daughters and their families.

As that first interim engagement wrapped up in October, I was already deep in conversations with two colleagues about launching a health IT advisory firm. On October 7, 2016, StarBridge Advisors officially launched.

And here we are – 10 years later.

Over the past decade, StarBridge has served healthcare organizations across the country, helping with leadership transitions, IT strategy, project-based work, and leadership and career coaching. With approximately 40 senior healthcare IT leaders on our Advisor team, we have worked with organizations ranging in size from large regional health systems to small community hospitals. Continue reading →

Freedom of the Press Isn’t Free

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Last month I wrote about the importance of voting, emphasizing that democracy is not a spectator sport. This month, my focus shifts to another essential part of a healthy democracy: a free press.

We often think of freedom of the press as something guaranteed by the First Amendment – and it is. But a free press doesn’t sustain itself. It depends on journalists willing to do difficult work, news organizations willing to stand up for their independence, and citizens who recognize the value of reliable information and are willing to support it.

The events of last week brought that home. When major news outlets were banned from the White House and other news organizations stood together in support of them, they sent a powerful message. News organizations that normally compete with one another recognized that something more fundamental was at stake. By standing together to defend press freedom, they prevailed.

Then, this weekend, my husband and I attended a gala fundraiser for the Plymouth Independent, a nonprofit, free-to-read online news organization serving the Plymouth, Massachusetts community.

We hesitated to buy tickets when we first heard about the event. We already support a number of cultural and arts organizations in our town, and there are always more worthy causes than dollars to go around.

But this was different.

The theme of the evening was “Celebrating 250 Years of the First Amendment.” Given everything happening around us, the timing felt especially significant. Along with about 300 other people, we opened our wallets for the silent auction, live auction and overall call for donations.

Why did it feel different? Continue reading →

Democracy Is Not a Spectator Sport: Why Your Vote Matters

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We spend a lot of time watching elections. We follow the polls, analyze the latest primary results, debate the candidates, and speculate about what might happen in November. But there is one data point that ultimately matters more than all the polls and predictions combined: the votes actually cast. Voting is not something we simply watch. It is how we participate in our democracy – and yes, voting matters.

The midterm elections are now only 75 days away, and primary season is in full swing. Every week seems to bring a new surprise as actual results differ from the polls and voters make their voices heard. The 2018 “blue wave” is a reminder that elections can shift the balance of power in Congress and change the direction of the country. But that only happens when people show up and vote.

The total number of registered voters who didn’t vote in the 2024 election was greater than the total number who voted for either the Democrat or Republican presidential candidate. We know how that turned out. Yes, voting matters!

And history reminds us that the right to vote should never be taken for granted. I am a faithful daily reader of Heather Cox Richardson’s Letters from an American, which puts today’s events in historical context. Two of her recent posts, on August 6 and August 18, were reminders of just how hard-won voting rights have been for women and people of color. Those rights were not inevitable. They were fought for, expanded, defended – and remain worth protecting today.

And yet, even today, some are calling for women’s hard-won right to vote to be rolled back. Some Christian nationalists advocate repealing women’s suffrage, with voting by household and women expected to defer to men. Continue reading →

Growing Older, Staying Human: Planning for the Life You Want

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Most of us spend more time planning vacations than planning for aging. Yet one unexpected fall, a medical diagnosis, or the gradual loss of independence can force life-changing decisions overnight – for ourselves or for someone we love. Recently, I listened to a podcast conversation that reminded me that aging isn’t simply about living longer. It’s about deciding how we want to live, preserving our humanity, and having conversations that matter before circumstances make the decisions for us.

As we get older, many of us find ourselves in a new role – not only thinking about our own future but helping aging parents, spouses, siblings, or friends navigate theirs. These experiences reinforce an important lesson: planning ahead isn’t pessimistic. It’s one of the greatest gifts we can give ourselves and the people who care about us.

The podcast that prompted these reflections was an episode of Staying Human, hosted by former U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy. In it, he interviews surgeon, public health researcher, and bestselling author Dr. Atul Gawande, whose book Being Mortal transformed the conversation about aging and end-of-life care. The episode, Atul Gawande: What Dying Teaches Us About How to Live is one of the most thoughtful discussions I’ve heard about what it really means to age well.

One message stood out above all others: the goal isn’t simply to extend life. It’s to live a life that reflects our values, our relationships, and our sense of purpose. More time isn’t always the same as more life.

Dr. Murthy expressed it beautifully in promoting the episode:

“For most of my medical training, the goal was straightforward: help patients live for as long as possible. But the more time I spent sitting at the bedside, the more I realized that more time is not always the same thing as more life.”

He goes on to describe how patients wanted more than longevity – they wanted to continue living lives that had meaning to them. That perspective is especially relevant today as healthcare embraces artificial intelligence and other advanced technologies. As Dr. Murthy notes, technology can help us analyze information and improve care, but it can never replace the empathy, compassion, and human connection that patients and families need most. Continue reading →

What “The Pitt” Gets Right About Healthcare – And Why That Should Worry Us

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We were latecomers to The Pitt, but once we started watching, we were hooked.

Friends and colleagues had been recommending it for months. What finally pushed us to start was hearing about an episode involving a cyberattack and system downtime – a storyline that immediately caught my attention as someone who has spent decades in healthcare IT. We decided to watch that episode first. I wasn’t even sure my husband would like the series, but one episode was all it took. We went back to the beginning and watched both seasons.

What unfolded episode after episode was far more than another hospital drama.

Yes, the show captures the intensity, compassion, exhaustion, humor, and emotional trauma of emergency medicine. But what makes The Pitt different is its willingness to expose the systemic failures surrounding healthcare delivery in this country – not through political speeches or simplistic villains, but through the lived experiences of clinicians, patients, and families. And through the strong moral compass of its lead characters.

The result is uncomfortable. And intentionally so.

If you ask people whether they have watched The Pitt, the reactions usually fall into three categories: I loved it, it was too intense and too close to home, or not yet. I understand the “too intense” response completely. As we worked our way through the series, it was rare that we wanted to watch more than one episode in a night.

Healthcare professionals I know have had especially strong reactions. A retired emergency physician who loved it told me, “I’ve seen most of it – just not all happening on one shift.” A former health system Chief Medical Officer loved it and commented on the range of social issues it addresses. So did lab professionals and physical therapists I encountered recently during my own healthcare experiences. One told me they deeply appreciated how accurately the show portrayed frontline staff.

That authenticity matters because the issues portrayed in The Pitt are not fictional exaggerations. They are daily realities.

The series tackles insurance barriers, homelessness, mental health crises, elder care, abortion rights, immigration enforcement, rural hospital closures, and mass shootings. It also confronts violence against healthcare workers, clinician burnout, emergency department overcrowding, staffing shortages, cybersecurity threats, budget cuts, residency pressures, addiction, and end-of-life decisions.

None of these problems exist in isolation. And that is exactly the point. Continue reading →

Fifty Years, Five Lessons: What Endures in Love and Life

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April is coming to a close next week. As I wrote in “Do you know your big rocks?”, April is a mixed month for me. My father died on April 23rd from Hodgkins Disease when I was a few days shy of my fourth birthday. Over the years, April has become a more joyous month. Both my daughters were married in April as I was.

On April 9th, my husband and I hit a major milestone in our relationship that only a small percentage of couples do – we celebrated our 50th wedding anniversary. Our story is an interesting one. When Tom first said let’s get married, I said, “No, people like us don’t make long term commitments”. I changed my mind later that day and a month later we got married in a judge’s office at the courthouse across the street from where I worked. I bought a dress I could wear both to work that morning and to get married that afternoon. Sound a bit like a workaholic??

My immediate family was with us as we exchanged our vows. We then headed to my mother and stepfather’s house for a small gathering and then to a nice local restaurant for dinner. Two days later, my husband and I got in our car and headed from Minneapolis to Tucson where his family lived. We had very little money back then. We slept in the car on the way there. I met his parents, brother and sister then for the first time. Tom overheard his parents saying the day after we arrived, “I thought he was marrying the other one” – meaning his college girlfriend whom they had met before.

Fast forward 50 years and we are still together having made and kept that long-term commitment to each other. We have two amazing daughters, two wonderful sons-in-laws, and four awesome grandchildren. They are all my big rocks. Continue reading →

The Front Door Test

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A virtual care experience that shows both the progress – and the gaps – in digital access

We talk a lot in healthcare about access. The shortage of primary care physicians continues to grow, while patients increasingly expect convenient, timely, and digital-first access to care. As a health IT leader, I know that technology can help close this gap. Recently, I found myself experiencing this challenge not as a CIO, but as a patient.

And like many patients, I started where people often do today: with an online search.

After about five days of persistent shoulder pain radiating down my right arm, I decided it was time to seek medical advice. An AI-driven search experience asked structured questions like a clinical intake. The information was thorough and well organized, but also a bit overwhelming. The recommendation was logical: given that I had rotator cuff surgery many years ago, I should contact my PCP or an orthopedic specialist.

That’s when I ran into a reality many patients are facing today. After having the same PCP for 25 years (with a brief interruption when I relocated for several years), my physician recently left the practice. That left me classified as a new patient, on a waiting list. No immediate access. No established relationship to lean on. Just the same access challenges we read about every day.

So, I decided to try my health system’s relatively new Virtual Care program. Continue reading →

Holding on to Hope: Women’s Leadership and the Work Still Ahead

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For the first time in more than a decade, I went two months without writing a blog.

That may not sound like much, but for someone who has been posting regularly since 2014 – often reflecting on leadership, health IT, and the advancement of women – it felt unusual. The truth is, I wasn’t sure what to say.

This has been a discouraging moment in our nation’s history.

And yet, it’s Women’s History Month. That feels exactly like the moment when reflection – and perhaps a bit of courage to speak honestly – matters most.

For years I’ve used March to reflect on the progress women have made and the work still ahead. This year, I find myself thinking about something different: how our history might look today if it already included our first woman president.

We had our chances.

I can’t help but wonder how our country might feel if women had reached the highest level of leadership. Would our national priorities look different? Would we see greater attention to economic security, healthcare access, environmental sustainability, or global cooperation?

Of course, no single leader determines the course of history. But representation matters. Leadership matters. And the absence of women at the very top of our political system remains striking.

Those of us who work in healthcare know something about leadership in challenging moments. The past several years have tested healthcare organizations and the people who lead them in unprecedented ways. One lesson stands out: progress rarely follows a straight line. It requires resilience, collaboration, and people willing to keep moving forward even when the path feels uncertain.

Hope can feel hard to hold onto in times like these. Continue reading →

Bearing Witness: When Conscience Requires More Than Silence

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I did not expect this to be the focus of my first blog post of 2026. But here we are. As I write, I am on my way home from a five-day visit to my family in Minneapolis. My hometown. The place where I grew up. The place where I met my husband, got married and had two children. While I moved away many years ago, my siblings, their adult children, and grandchildren all still live there.

Minneapolis is a progressive, diverse city. It is a proud, resilient community. I love going back to visit.

Tuesday night my brother and sister-in-law took my sister and I out to dinner at a restaurant near downtown that is owned and operated by a non-profit, North American Traditional Indigenous Food Systems. There were two signs behind the hostess desk that made it clear that federal agents may not stage immigration operations on the property.

On Wednesday, Minneapolis was rocked by the fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three children, by an ICE agent. It happened a few miles from my sister’s downtown apartment and several blocks from where my husband and I once lived. I was both heartbroken and outraged as I watched the videos of this tragic event and read the assertions being perpetrated by the administration that this was domestic terrorism.

While I did not attend the vigil Wednesday night with thousands of others, my sister and I participated in the 4pm weekly standout at the intersection outside her downtown apartment building.  Signs re-used each week by the regulars are what you would expect – Resist, Wakeup, Save Democracy, No Kings – and yet the newest ones focused on getting ICE out of Minneapolis. 90% of the cars that passed honked in support of us. Continue reading →

On Connections and Caring: The Work That Outlasts Our Careers

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My LinkedIn feed was filled with CHIME Fall Forum recaps and pictures this past week. I refrained from posting a recap as I focused primarily on the one-on-one people connections. At the closing session we were asked to give one word that best described the week. Mine was “connections” – it turned out to be the top one in the resulting word cloud from all the attendees, along with several synonyms for connections. This is especially true after years of virtual meetings and knowing people only on zoom – the value of in-person time is immeasurable.

As the days went by at the fall forum, I realized that my primary role in professional circles these days is as a connector. I had many conversations involving career advice and made a lot of introductions for people. I heard how much this was appreciated by people I talked to along with their recognition that I do this for so many others in our industry.

I’m grateful to all those who mentored and helped me during my four decades in health IT management. So, my commitment to developing next generation leaders is something I take seriously.

At this point in my career, providing coaching services, volunteering as a mentor in multiple programs, informal mentoring, giving career advice, sharing information and intel about current job openings, making introductions, and a lot of listening is what I enjoy doing and am willing to give time to. I probably get 1-2 requests a week and always make time to schedule a short call.

I also had a few conversations with CHIME staff, board members, foundation firms, and colleagues about how LCHIME (lifetime CHIME) members can continue to contribute once they no longer work full-time for a provider organization. Continue reading →