Ten years goes fast. But looking back, there are a few things I wish someone had told me on day one — things I had to learn the hard way.
The hierarchy on paper isn’t how things actually work
When I started out, I thought getting leadership buy-in was the finish line. Get the executives aligned, and the rest follows.
It doesn’t work that way.
The people who actually make or break any change in a healthcare organization are the ones in the middle — the coordinators, the nurses, the front desk staff. They’re the ones who know where the real bottlenecks are, and they’re the ones who will either make your new process work or quietly route around it.
I learned to spend less time in the boardroom and more time on the floor.
Technology is rarely the real problem
Healthcare loves a new technology solution. EHRs, patient portals, telehealth, AI — each one arrives with a promise to transform everything.
And each one runs into the same wall: people.
Not because people resist change for no reason. But because implementation plans consistently underestimate how much support, training, and follow-through it takes to actually change how someone does their job.
If a project is failing, the technology is almost never the cause. The cause is almost always in the rollout — how it was communicated, how people were trained, how feedback was handled.
Data problems are usually people problems in disguise
I used to think that getting systems to share data was mostly a technical challenge. Better standards, better APIs, better infrastructure.
That’s part of it. But the bigger barrier is almost always organizational. Who owns the data? Who benefits from sharing it? Whose workflow gets disrupted?
The technology for exchanging health data is largely there. What’s lagging is the alignment — between organizations, between departments, between competing priorities.
The patient is always in the picture
Healthcare strategy discussions can get abstract fast. Margins, utilization rates, payer mix, throughput.
But on the way back from a strategy meeting, you pass through a waiting room. And there’s a person sitting there, looking uncertain, holding a folder of paperwork.
That’s who all of this is for.
I’ve found that staying close to the clinical environment — not just the spreadsheets — keeps the work grounded. The question shifts from “what’s efficient?” to “what’s right, and how do we make it work?”
What I’m still figuring out
Ten years in, I’m more convinced than ever that healthcare is one of the most complex systems humans have built — and one of the most worth working on.
The problems are hard. The stakes are real. And there’s no shortage of things left to learn.
That’s what keeps me here.
What’s the biggest lesson your career has taught you? I’d love to hear it — connect with me on LinkedIn.