On Best Practices

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 →

Insights for Leading Through Uncertainty

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Is it writer’s block or being discouraged by the state of our country that is getting in the way of my writing these days? I admit that I struggle with what to write that my loyal readers would relate to and be willing to read. One of the people I’m currently coaching noted this week that it’s been a while since I wrote a blog post and she missed seeing something from me. Maybe others are thinking the same, or not.

After some thought, I decided to do what many on social media do, amplify! There is so much great content from others to share.

Who to amplify was not a hard decision. My colleague at StarBridge Advisors, David Muntz, has been writing most of our View from the Bridge blog posts for some time now. He wrote two very insightful and grounding posts in recent months that have helped me have a more positive perspective in these troubling times. Given the reactions these blogs have generated from readers, they appear to have been valuable overall to many others as well.

As the titles suggest, he shares lessons from healthcare and his experience as a leader that we can all use during these challenging times.

Living and Leading in Chaotic and Uncertain Times

From Healing Hands to Healing Hearts: What the Nation Can Learn from Healthcare

I highly recommend you find time to read them both and share widely with your own network.

Care at Home Isn’t New – But Scaling It Is the Real Breakthrough

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When you look back at healthcare delivery over the decades, care at home is not new. Home Care (VNA) has been around for over a century, and gained significant traction with the expansion of Medicare in the 1960’s. By the 1980’s, VNA was considered part of the “continuum of care” for most large healthcare systems.

Johns Hopkins University began development of the first Hospital at Home program in the U.S. in the 1990s. But it wasn’t until the early 2010s that I started hearing the term “hospital at home”. It was a vision that our Chief Medical Officer at a Midwestern academic health system started promoting internally.

CMS formalized the Acute Hospital Care at Home (AHCaH) waiver program during COVID as part of their response to the capacity crisis. As of late 2022, CMS had approved over 250 hospitals.

In early 2023, my daughter who is a Nurse Practitioner told me there was an opening for the Director of Advanced Practice Providers (NP/PA) for Home Hospital at her health system – Mass General Brigham. She had been the Chief Nurse Practitioner on a growing Orthopedic/Spine Surgery inpatient service at one of their community hospitals for over 11 years at that point. I was quick to encourage her to apply, telling her that it represented the future and was a great opportunity.

Fast forward to today and that program is one of the largest in the country and is operating at scale.

But why do so many hospital at home programs fail or struggle to scale? The complexities and challenges are significant yet the benefits for hospitals, patients and their families are tangible.

You can learn more in our StarBridge Advisors blog, “The Rise of Care at Home: Healthcare’s Most Important Shift is Already Underway” by John Campbell.  I’ve known John since the early 2000s when we were colleagues as CIOs within the Mass General Brigham (MGB) health system. His experience and insights are invaluable to anyone navigating care at home programs whether from an operational, clinical or technological perspective. John brings deep expertise in home-based care models, digital transformation, and care delivery innovation. At MGB he led technology strategy for Healthcare at Home and Post-Acute Care – translating vision into scalable, patient-centered programs.

I will be joining John and David Muntz this Wednesday August 6th from 3-4 PM ET for a ProNexus Advisory sponsored Real Talk live event titled: “Care at Home: Healthcare’s Next Frontier is Already Here”. You can register here.

It should be a lively and enlightening conversation!

Why I Keep Showing Up: Coaching, Mentoring, and Developing Future Leaders

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With graduation season behind us, the end of June is a great time to talk about developing the next generation of health IT leaders.

I’ve been a volunteer mentor to 7 students and early careerists over the past several months through two different programs – the New England HIMSS Chapter and RIBBA. I’m happy to say that five of them have gotten jobs in a very tough job market. Part of our work together included refining resumes, preparing for interviews, answering their questions on salary negotiation, and helping them get in front of the right people at the companies where they applied. Some of my mentees were international students who faced unique concerns given the new administration.

I currently have several coaching engagements in process and have coached many more health IT leaders over the past 10 years. Progress and growth come in many different forms depending on one’s leadership development and career goals. Two of my coachees have recently been named to the Becker’s list of “100 Women to Know in Health IT 2025.” And in recent years, another coachee was recognized with the “HIMSS Most Influential Women in Health IT Award” along with five other women. As we worked together, some of their goals were to increase their networks and broaden their involvement in our industry. These recognitions affirmed their progress towards these goals.

Most weeks my schedule also includes at least 1-2 calls with colleagues who are in transition between jobs or considering make a change – they are looking for some perspective and advice as well as insight on open positions. Continue reading →

The Power of Peer Learning for Health IT Leaders

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I recently had the opportunity to spend time with about 15 health system CIOs as they discussed some of their current challenges at a This Week Health 229 Summit. No surprise that there were some common themes like governance, managing a remote workforce, internal IT operations, innovation, and AI. The value of collaborative discussions where health IT leaders can learn from one another in a safe, non-competitive space is immeasurable. And it goes without saying that an in-person gathering with informal 1:1 and small group conversations brings its own benefits.

The role of the CIO in healthcare continues to evolve and CIOs must evolve with their organizations. Bill Russell, former health system CIO and founder of This Week Health, wrote a very insightful piece recently on the changing CIO role – The Healthcare CIO Continuum: From Caretaker to Innovator. The article is part of his new LinkedIn newsletter – The Healthcare CIO Playbook, Strategies, Stories, and Secrets from 1,000 Healthcare Conversations.

In the article, he describes four phases in the evolution of the healthcare CIO role starting in the 1980s. He then goes on to describe four current CIO personas along a continuum from caretaker to innovator:

  • The Technical Foundation Builder
  • The Operational Optimizer
  • The Clinical Enabler
  • The Strategic Innovator

He talks about the key factors driving CIOs toward the innovator end of the continuum and then outlines the competencies needed. He closes by challenging CIOs to assess where they are on the continuum and develop the competencies needed to meet the challenges and opportunities of 2025 and beyond.

Over the past several years, Bill has been an invaluable resource to health IT leaders in our industry with his multiple podcast shows on This Week Health and the 229 Project with in-person small group summits, and more recently city tour dinners. In this work, Bill is supported by two other well respected health IT leaders – Drex DeFord and Sarah Richardson. Bill’s latest LinkedIn newsletter and weekly articles are one more way to learn from him. I highly recommend subscribing to his newsletter and all the This Week Health offerings – and of course you should read the full healthcare CIO continuum article!

We are stronger together and can always learn from one another. Given the financial constraints provider organizations are facing, I hope you can find creative ways to stay current, develop new skills and competencies, learning and teaching as you grow.

The Next Chapter: Smarter Aging for You, Your Family, and Your Future

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I’ve been thinking about aging a lot lately. Birthdays are coming up for my husband and me – neither of us is getting any younger. Friends my age are losing older spouses. Friends my age are dealing with health issues of spouses. And younger friends are dealing with health issues of their elder parents. Extended family members are considering what level of services they may have to arrange in the near future or move into a more age-friendly situation.

And then there are the uncertainties surrounding Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid facing all of us. Not to mention the stock market.

Last week I wrote about the importance of social connection – especially as we age.

59 million people in the U.S. are 65 or older. Based on personal experience and decades working in healthcare, here is some advice on aging whether it applies to you or a loved one:

    • Keep active mentally and physically. Maintain social connections with family and friends. Embed yourself in a community to avoid isolation. Develop a new hobby that involves learning something new to avoid stagnation. Make it something you can do for years to come.
    • Be your own advocate with your healthcare providers or find a family member to help advocate for you.
    • If you have a clinician in the family, listen to them. They can advise and help interpret what might seem like confusing and overwhelming medical information.
    • If you have a non-clinician in the family who works in healthcare and knows how to navigate to get access to the right kind of care and specialists, let them help you.
    • Plan ahead and talk with your family about your plans. Make a retirement aging plan. Outline the decision points – for example, what would be the trigger that it’s time to move out of your house or apartment and into a care facility or to have services come to you. Maybe it is when you are unable to do stairs, have a significant fall risk, or are unable to do activities of daily living (ADL). Avoid having a reactive approach. Make the necessary changes when you want to and can, not when you are forced to.
    • Recognize when it is time to give up the big, too much to maintain, multi-story single family home you raised your family in for something smaller, simpler with single floor living.
    • Recognize when you need help and get it. It may mean having services come into your home or moving into a Continuing Care Retirement Community (CCRC) where you can progress from independent living, to assisted living, to memory care if needed, to skilled nursing care.
    • If you have family members who can help you with aging members of your family, figure out how everyone can play a role whether they live locally or not.
    • If you are a caregiver for a loved one, recognize when you need the help of others or services in your home.
    • Lastly, hospice is not just about the final days of life. There are varying levels of hospice care to consider and make use of when the time comes.

As for my husband and me, we moved from a big single-family home into a townhouse neighborhood in a planned community a few years ago. It is a multi-level townhouse with a master bedroom and bath on the first floor. How we use our upper and lower levels today (office space, guest bedroom, art studio, and family room) can change if stairs become difficult at some point. We will still have a guest bedroom for family and friends to visit and a family room for the grandkids to play in.

We have a will and family trust setup. We have advanced directives. We invested in long-term care insurance decades ago. We plan to review all this and our overall financial assets with our daughters in the near future so they are fully aware and don’t have to worry.

Do we have more planning to do? Yes. We will do it together and proactively in the years to come.

Related Post:

Fostering Social Connection for Health and Well-being

 

Fostering Social Connection for Health and Well-Being

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Relationships and human connection matters. Whether it’s a best friend / BFF, a close work colleague, a neighbor, a roommate, or a long-term committed spouse or partner, relationships do matter. And they take time to develop, nurture and sustain.

Vivek H. Murthy, MD, former Surgeon General from 2015 to 2017 and again from 2021 to 2025, spoke at the HIMSS19 CIO Forum on the prevalence of loneliness in our society and its devastating impacts on health. His 2023 book, “Together: The Healing Power of Human Connection in a Sometimes Lonely World”, makes a compelling case that loneliness is a public health concern and offers inspiring stories of how individuals and communities are helping people realize they are not alone.

In 2023, HHS published “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation – The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community”. In Dr. Murthy’s opening letter of the publication, he said:

“Each of us can start now, in our own lives, by strengthening our connections and relationships. Our individual relationships are an untapped resource – a source of healing hiding in plain sight. They can help us live healthier, more productive, and more fulfilled lives. Answer that phone call from a friend. Make time to share a meal. Listen without the distraction of your phone. Perform an act of service. Express yourself authentically. The keys to human connection are simple, but extraordinarily powerful.”

My husband and I have lived in 7 different cities since we first met. That means many different jobs, neighborhoods and church communities.  I envy people who have close friends that go all the way back to grade school or high school. Continue reading →

Guardrails Matter: Protecting Ethics, Trust, and Stability in Health IT

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I don’t know about you, but my head is spinning these days. So much happening at such an incredible speed. While it may sound like I’m talking about the typical workday for health IT leaders in fast paced organizations, I’m referring to the bigger picture of our federal government under the new administration. I’ve not written a blog in several weeks – in part for loss of words and in part because I’ve had a partial work break spending time in warmer climates.

In the spirit of amplifying important messages from others, my re-entry to blogging is to share an important blog written recently by my StarBridge Advisors colleague, David Muntz – “Protecting Trusted Guardrails: The Perils of Removing Essential Protections”. David has firsthand experience working in the federal government. He left his CIO role at Baylor Health in 2012 to accept a White House appointment to serve as the first Principal Deputy National Coordinator and CIO at ONC (Health and Human Services’ Office of the National Coordinator) through the following year. He was a member of HHS’ Chief of Staff Council and Chair of the Federal Health Architecture and mHealth Councils.

The message in his blog is a strong one that health IT leaders can relate to.

Guardrails, whether physical, organizational, or ethical exist for a reason. They safeguard patient safety, data privacy, free expression, and public trust while ensuring that critical institutions operate with integrity and accountability. When these safeguards are dismantled or weakened, the risks to individuals, organizations, and society become profound.

David explores the vital role of independent oversight, regulatory protections, and ethical leadership, drawing on his decades of experience in healthcare, government service, and executive leadership. Recent mass firings and policy shifts raise urgent concerns about transparency, security, and long-term stability.

Key questions that apply to our work as health IT leaders:

  • What happens when critical oversight is removed?
  • How do we ensure ethical governance in a rapidly evolving world?
  • What are the long-term consequences of dismantling trusted institutions?

Now more than ever, we must stand for principled leadership, responsible governance, and a commitment to the greater good. We must uphold the values that sustain our institutions and protect our future.

I encourage you to read his blog and as always stay informed, vigilant and engaged.

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