← Risk Never Sleeps Podcast
Risk Never Sleeps Podcast
Episode #217. Too Many Systems, Not Enough Connection: Healthcare’s Silent Problem, with Nancy Wright, Vice President of Digital Structures and Platforms at GE HealthCare
00:18:26
Loading summary
Transcript171 lines
- [00:00]
A
Foreign. Welcome to Risk Never Sleeps, where we meet and get to know the people delivering patient care and protecting patient safety. I'm your host, Ed Gaudet. Welcome to the Risk Never Sleeps podcast in which we learn about the people that are on the front lines protecting patient safety and delivering patient care. I'm Ed Gaudette, the host of the program and today I am pleased to be joined by Nancy Wright from GE Healthcare.
- [00:31]
B
Good morning.
- [00:31]
A
Good morning. It's early in la.
- [00:35]
B
Absolutely. It's that sunrise, palm trees. It's a good day so far.
- [00:39]
A
Yeah. We're not raking snow off of our roofs, so it's all good, right?
- [00:42]
B
Absolutely.
- [00:43]
A
All right, so let's start off with maybe sharing a little bit about your current role, your organization, and a little bit about your background with listeners.
- [00:50]
B
Absolutely. So I'm currently the vice president of Digital structures and platforms 4G healthcare. And what does that really mean from a services business center organization? We're really looking to make sure that we're able to work across all of the different areas of the hospital and aggregating data and lifecycle management for assets. So anything that a clinician or anybody that's delivering care needs to have access to from a lifecycle perspective, we want to make sure that it's at the ready. We want to make sure that it's where it needs to be and that it's functioning to the top priority. Now, when we pull that into then the digital space and my own personal evolution. So I started in operations and clinical workflow at GE.
- [01:28]
A
Okay.
- [01:28]
B
Yeah. I've been with GE for about 10, well, I'm going to say into my 12th year.
- [01:32]
A
Okay.
- [01:32]
B
But before then, you know, international exports, imports with Brookfield. So bit of a different perspective from my end. But my journey really came from working in hospitals, clinical workflows, operations management. And what I saw very clearly is the gap that gray between what clinicians needed to do and deliver and the pressures they were facing and then all the pressures from the operations and what I call the halo around the health system.
- [01:55]
A
Yeah.
- [01:56]
B
So your biomedicals, your facilities, your financials, everything from the compounding impact. And there always seems to be that kind of gray in between the two of what those priorities are in the day to day management. That's where I really got excited about what I call the halo around a health team. And that's the digital infrastructure and how we can do that. So that progresses me to where I am today with ge. And then how do we make digital platforms harmonize across a health system so that you have access to one system so that every part of the hospital can actually utilize the same data.
- [02:28]
A
Interesting. And so you must swim in AI right now.
- [02:32]
B
AI? Is that that buzzword? And it's like, what do we do with it? What does it mean? How do we improve? Yeah, absolutely. I think the onset of like, you know, a good maturity, three to five years cybersecurity is probably where we started and really kind of making sure that we could deploy AI agents and learning from it for anything that was off device. So I would say yes, from a swimming perspective, but I think it's more about what do we want to do with it. So that's always a loaded question. People like, what are you guys doing with AI? I'm like, in what aspects? Absolutely, yeah.
- [02:59]
A
And so in what aspect are you using it for data aggregation? Are you using it for insights? Using it for everything above?
- [03:07]
B
I would say right now the most exciting part would be from a data aggregation perspective. So when we talk about, across all of those different areas of a hospital, that data aggregation piece, because there's so many silos sitting right, so so many systems are deployed, so many efficiencies, we want clinicians to have access to, let's say, you know, AI and improved care models and things like that. But then every time you're deploying something, you're actually creating a different data frame, a different data silo. So what we're deploying now is the ability to actually go and have the agents so that they can read or normalize the language of all these different swim lanes and then bring it into one that's pretty powerful in terms of understanding and saying, you know, where are cost pressures? What's going on? How do we help protect our assets and our systems? If I were to go to say, you know, how many different silos do you have in a health system? And health leaders are always surprised when we actually go in and do the assessment. They're like, oh, we must have, you know, four or five systems running. We have our ehr, we have this, we have that. I'm like, no, you've got like close to 50. Once you're getting into, you know, cardiology has something going and oncology has their own something going. Then your operating team has something going. So that I think from an AI perspective, how do we normalize all of that to read everything as one coherence group got it.
- [04:15]
A
How did you get into healthcare?
- [04:17]
B
I got into healthcare by. I say serendipitously, I fell into it. So from an operations background, right? So I Came into GE in contracts management and bringing on our Siebel platform, which is our CMMS platform, computerized maintenance, management management systems. I'm bilingual, so where I sat at the time, they're like, hey, you've been contracting, you've done imports and exports, you obviously know how to do the languages. Let's bring you in to do this. And then I very, very quickly saw what was happening in the health system and I didn't want to be in the background doing the contracting work and doing it. Although it was great to support the teams, I'm very much a person of wanting to solve problems. That's where I excel. I like to bring clarity into what is mess. I like to be able to reorganize, restructure and then kind of make sense of what's going on in an environment. So very, very quickly I moved into commercial activity and being able to support the redesign of health systems and that learning journey there. So I'm very grateful to have fallen into it. As I always say, if you go
- [05:11]
A
back in time and you see your 20 year old self, what would you tell her?
- [05:15]
B
I would tell her to honestly probably chill out a little bit.
- [05:19]
A
Oh really? You seem pretty chill.
- [05:21]
B
No? Yeah. If there's one thing.
- [05:24]
A
Yeah, that was good.
- [05:25]
B
I'm chill as I'm on. Like I don't know what is, but I'm already my third coffee. I'm very chill.
- [05:30]
A
Only three.
- [05:31]
B
Only three so far.
- [05:32]
A
You're French, you should be drinking nine like Americanos, triple shots and.
- [05:37]
B
Absolutely. No, no, but I would definitely say sooner. Sooner for in terms of the, the digital acceleration and what's going on right now. Do you hear it a lot in terms of take that learning and then what does it mean to you? But I, I would say do it sooner. I went into lean Six Sigma development which was really good.
- [05:53]
A
Out of school, right? Out of school.
- [05:54]
B
No, no, no, no. So in terms, this is what I mean, like in terms of doing it sooner.
- [05:57]
A
Yeah.
- [05:57]
B
I don't think that that a traditional path. Like.
- [06:00]
A
Yeah, right.
- [06:01]
B
So that's from everybody coming into or out of school now and they're trying to follow what does that career look like. And I would say honestly pick up what's going on in digital in any aspect that you're, I mean cyber security was always number one for me.
- [06:12]
A
Yeah.
- [06:13]
B
So I'd say, you know, start picking up and reading it. But 25 year old me, I would say you're. It doesn't have to be such a traditional path. Right. Start learning about what is going on now in the digital space. And then before you're hearing about, you know, people having opinions about AI or have an opinion about agentic AI or have an opinion about this, I would say pick up some good founding research and then learn about it in different aspects of it. Because what you're going to uncover is going to help you greatly. It's going to help probably not stumble into so many roadblocks that I did.
- [06:40]
A
Yeah. As you look out over the next couple of years, what's top of your
- [06:43]
B
list for strategic initiatives, Strategic initiatives for health systems, 2026-2030. That. That map. And as we're going into really solving at the enterprise level, the complexity of it, I hear, you know, we hear margin pressures all the time, we hear tariff pressures all the time. And what's going on. And I think that that storm that has. And it doesn't change. Right. We know five years saying pressures. Ten years ago we were saying pressures. But the interesting thing from 2026 into 20 and how you're kind of creating that map now is seeing a very clear breakdown of silos. I'm very bullish about breaking down the silos of data. And I think if you're able to harness AI and the next generation of, let's say, agentic AI to be able to do a lot of that scripting and things for you, let's use that. Because once we're able to break down the silos of data, you're no longer going to have to force your margin pressures out of cost cutting. I strongly believe that. So perfect example is when we're working with health systems. Most of the time the cybersecurity program sits on its own. Right. It sits in its own stack. It should be protected for a lot of great reasons. So I can hear CIOs right now being very mad at me and saying. Hang on a second before you say something. Go read. No, I probably. Follow me for a second. So they sit very much in their own silo for good reasons, but with all the same governance and all of the same protocols in place, I believe strongly that we will see a shift of having cybersecurity integrated into the rest of the health systems.
- [08:05]
A
Yeah.
- [08:06]
B
Will no longer be operation sits in this one.
- [08:08]
A
It can't be a silo. No.
- [08:09]
B
Cyber security in another one. Clinical in another one.
- [08:12]
A
Continuity in another one.
- [08:13]
B
Yeah.
- [08:14]
A
Emergency preparedness is another one.
- [08:15]
B
Yeah. So it's interesting because on one hand we talk about interoperability and we want interoperability and we need that to be able to Reduce a lot of those wasting and margins and things like that. Let's start to look at that. If you're firing your cybersecurity program right into your main platform, let's say, and you build up that platform with cybersecurity as the bedrock of it, you've got a completely different outlook for your health system. So that's the mission critical. That's the number one, I believe, for you.
- [08:40]
A
Worry about what's going to happen to people.
- [08:42]
B
Oh, so I worry about what's happening now without people, but not enough people. So I'm kind of flipping the script on that. But from a very pragmatic way, when we're looking at, from a human health resource perspective, and you can apply it to nursing, you could apply it to biomed, you can apply it to anybody that's delivering cybersecurity. But the retirements that's coming right now and our inability to be able to replenish our workforce is very, very real. Yeah. So to people, I'd say I'm not worried about people going away or replacing people. I'm worried about we've got 20 technologists retiring next year and I can't overload 1200 assets onto every single biomedical technologist that still resides in the hospital today.
- [09:18]
A
Yeah.
- [09:19]
B
So we kind of shifted that way, right, in terms of saying if we're going to replace or just say, you know, are we afraid that, you know, there's going to make every job obsolescent or what's going on with that? Let's look at how we can use it and maybe build pragmatically that way. Make the tech work for you. Help your teams that are currently there right now that are already feeling like they're underwater and they can't actually function, you know, they're looking at the work. They're like, I have to be here for like 15 hours a day just to get. Yes. Like, let's help them do that. And then you can look to say, I may not have to replace the 20 that are retiring next year because I can't do it anyways.
- [09:50]
A
Biggest lesson in life through your journey. What's sort of the biggest takeaway for you? Biggest lesson?
- [09:56]
B
Always be curious. I would, honestly. So you.
- [09:58]
A
That's great.
- [09:59]
B
You might hear it. But if there's a thing about challenging the status quo and wanting to impact, impact change and wanting to drive it further. But from the journey through healthcare, I say it is the best journey ever. Hang on for dear life. Because healthcare is messy. Doing those transitions are messy. Walking with Health systems. And even from a GE healthcare perspective, everything we're swarming through. Right. In terms of bringing our systems up and, and creating our own interoperability so that we're ready to deliver it is extremely messy. Right. So I'd say that the reward of that is so fantastic.
- [10:28]
A
Yeah.
- [10:29]
B
But I. It's enlightening. So curious. Always, always remain curious.
- [10:32]
A
And I love that.
- [10:33]
B
If you get to the point of feeling exhausted or you just kind of want to throw your hands up and step back, because we all have that.
- [10:39]
A
Yeah.
- [10:39]
B
Go find something to be curious about. Go poke your nose somewhere.
- [10:43]
A
Keep that childlike curiosity burning. Right.
- [10:46]
B
Yeah.
- [10:47]
A
Alive. Yeah. No, so many, so many people lose it. I think, you know, as you get older, you get too serious. You take yourself too seriously and you lose that creativity.
- [10:54]
B
Yeah.
- [10:55]
A
That's so spot on. If you weren't doing this job, what would you be doing? What are you most passionate about outside of work?
- [11:00]
B
Honestly, I would probably be doing like airlift paramedics.
- [11:03]
A
Oh yeah. Wow.
- [11:05]
B
Yeah.
- [11:05]
A
Have you done that before?
- [11:06]
B
So, I mean, coming out of. We talked about coming out of school.
- [11:08]
A
Yeah.
- [11:09]
B
The decisions that you take, the path that you go. Right. So the opportunity. I'm a Navy kind of brat. I had the opportunity to actually line up with Coast Guard and kind of start that program where I would have been, you know, that, that was very much attract 17 year old me.
- [11:21]
A
Yeah.
- [11:21]
B
Fresh out of school. And then I opted to go a different route. You know, I took offshoot B and I'm very grateful for it. But I would be doing. That's what I'd be doing. I'd be doing your error lift paramedics now.
- [11:31]
A
Interesting. So that's a fairly risky profession. What's the riskiest thing you've ever done?
- [11:37]
B
You could kind of tell by, you know, what I was going to do when I was 17. I'm like, this is totally cool. Yeah. So definitely the riskiest thing that I've done is probably very naively decided to take a hike into the Grand Canyon and unprepared for what that meant. So as you know, going down versus up. But definitely BASE jumping. So you could tell a little bit from the adrenaline part of what I love. So the Grand Canyon was one just. Just very much unprepared for what that
- [12:01]
A
was going to be jumping.
- [12:02]
B
Yeah.
- [12:03]
A
What is that?
- [12:04]
B
Like the best part about it is you literally, I tell people you can spend a year in therapy or you can spend 15 seconds base jumping and it will give you the same clarity of your brain. Yeah. It completely wipes Everything out. You cannot think of anything else for those 10, 15 seconds. Wow. So I kind of just about it for like, you know, one year of therapy or 15 seconds of base jumping, you're good to go.
- [12:24]
A
Yeah. Interesting. Any advice you'd give to people coming out of school that want to get into healthcare or cybersecurity?
- [12:32]
B
Yeah, I go back to. It doesn't have to be traditional. Like, that's like the number one thing. So people think about healthcare even still today, and they think about like, I'm gonna become a nurse or I'm gonna become a. Which is all really good. But where. You know, to our healthcare heroes. But in the world of infrastructure today and how much we do have to deploy from a technology perspective. Yeah. I would definitely encourage people, like, have conversations with companies like the ges, have conversations with even like your local biomet shops or things like that. If you go through and if you see somebody doing a role in a hospital that looks very different, have a con with that person. I really think that there's a wider lens that can be seen so from a healthcare. So even if you say, you know, I would love to work in technology, but I still, you know, there's a possibility to be on the front line. So many people still just don't really know what we do in the background and what it takes to actually operationalize that full halo. They kind of fall into it later in their life. Right. Yeah. So I would say have some conversations, stay very, very curious. If you're doing your discovery days out of school or if you're talking to somebody who's advising, ask them to be, you know, healthcare. But healthcare plus digital. Yeah, Bring in the digital aspect of it. And even if you're searching like healthcare plus digital, you'll find all of these roles kind of pop up. And I think the learning there would be fantastic.
- [13:40]
A
Yeah. And be open to the journey, right?
- [13:42]
B
Absolutely.
- [13:43]
A
Yeah.
- [13:43]
B
Yeah.
- [13:43]
A
Which is really important because you never know where it's going to take you.
- [13:45]
B
Untraditional. That's a new word. I don't know if it's an actual word, but we're going to coin it as a new word.
- [13:51]
A
Untraditional, untraditional approach. I love it.
- [13:53]
B
You got it.
- [13:53]
A
All right. You're on an island. You can bring five albums with you. What would you bring? Or movies, whatever your albums or movies.
- [13:59]
B
Okay. Well, we definitely need some Bon Jovi in our life.
- [14:01]
A
Oh.
- [14:02]
B
So that's all right.
- [14:02]
A
Living on a prayer.
- [14:03]
B
Beautiful. Going to need one if we're on an island.
- [14:05]
A
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. A reminder that you're on the island living on a prayer.
- [14:10]
B
Exactly. And I think because it popped into my mind Saturday, I was having a drive with a friend and gone in 62nd. Nick Cage. Like, anything from Nicholas Cage in that era.
- [14:20]
A
Oh, wow.
- [14:21]
B
So, yeah, Yeah. A bit of a car movie.
- [14:23]
A
Nick Cage is a great actor, but
- [14:25]
B
the soundtrack of that movie is really, really, really.
- [14:27]
A
Yeah. What's on the soundtrack?
- [14:28]
B
Yeah, so you should like that opening song to it. It just kind of. It brings back that vibe.
- [14:32]
A
Oh, okay.
- [14:32]
B
Yeah.
- [14:33]
A
What else?
- [14:33]
B
Okay, so that was too. So I got to go into a. My country roots. I gotta say, anything from Chris Stapleton, so bring that forward. Right, Good.
- [14:40]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [14:41]
B
So you're gonna need something to cry to at night just because you're stuck on an island.
- [14:43]
A
Because you're on an island.
- [14:45]
B
So Bon Jovi's gonna be your prayer. Chris Stapleton's gonna rock you to sleep. That's good. Yeah. That's three, right?
- [14:51]
A
Yeah, that's three.
- [14:52]
B
That's pretty good. I'm a pretty simple person. Five is a lot for me.
- [14:54]
A
Yeah. Yeah. So what genre of movies you like? Comedy. Horror.
- [14:59]
B
Yeah, I mean, comedy and action.
- [15:01]
A
No. Okay.
- [15:01]
B
Comedy and action.
- [15:02]
A
Yeah, yeah. So any good movies recently?
- [15:04]
B
Yeah, I was trying to remember the name of it. It's. It just released. It's Jason and then his brother's on there, and they're both like cops that went rogue. I was trying to remember as we were talking, like, what's the name?
- [15:14]
A
What's the name of it? Do you know? Oh, he doesn't know.
- [15:15]
B
On Prime Son.
- [15:17]
A
Prime.
- [15:18]
B
He knows. He's, like, at the top.
- [15:19]
A
He doesn't know.
- [15:20]
B
Yeah, but so if it's action or comedy's got to come. Dave Batista. Yeah, in it. Oh, really good.
- [15:28]
A
Yeah, yeah.
- [15:29]
B
He plays like the older brother that's very disgruntled. Like, it kind of works.
- [15:32]
A
I saw the Smashing Machine on the way out here with the. The Rock. See, it's pretty interesting. Yeah. Did you see it?
- [15:38]
B
Yes.
- [15:38]
A
Oh, yeah. Yeah, it's pretty interesting.
- [15:40]
B
That's a really, really good one. Anything with the Rock. Anything with Mike Wahlberg in it.
- [15:44]
A
Like, see, not Wahlberg. Yeah, yeah. He's badass.
- [15:47]
B
Yeah, they did a Pain and Gain. See, you could do that one. That's my fourth. Pain and Gate is my fourth.
- [15:53]
A
Okay.
- [15:53]
B
Yeah. Two music albums, two movies. There you go.
- [15:56]
A
No hip hop or rap or anything.
- [15:58]
B
I mean, anything by Drake. Let's Bring It.
- [16:01]
A
Drake. I was expecting Machine Gun Kelly.
- [16:06]
B
No, no, Anything by Honestly, like, Bring It Back to the six.
- [16:10]
A
Okay.
- [16:11]
B
Yeah. It's got to be anything by Drake.
- [16:12]
A
All right.
- [16:13]
B
To kind of wrap it up. So that's a very, you know, we've got some country feels, we've got some Bon Jovi for the soul, and then we've got some Drake to pump.
- [16:19]
A
Nice. Do you have time to read?
- [16:20]
B
Do I have time to read? Other than.
- [16:23]
A
You're busy.
- [16:23]
B
Other than coursework. I am excited. Yeah. So I do try to keep up with coursework and my own, like, always learning.
- [16:29]
A
Right.
- [16:29]
B
Yeah. So I'm trying to actually, like, from a next perspective, I'll be going back into school modes. That's another thing I tell people, like, always be learning. Right. Always be curious. Yeah. All should be doing my CIO credentialing, so hopefully.
- [16:41]
A
Nice.
- [16:42]
B
We'll see if I get to be part of the club.
- [16:44]
A
Great. What will you do with that?
- [16:46]
B
I. Well, I look at it again as just more discovery. Right. So to be able to actually build so healthcare perspective or anywhere I'm working, evolving, changing. Yeah.
- [16:55]
A
Yeah.
- [16:56]
B
I want to be able to really understand a lot more of the elements of struggles they go through. Right. And the considerations they have to do.
- [17:02]
A
Yeah.
- [17:03]
B
And then how is it to actually walk?
- [17:04]
A
Any desire to do your own thing, start your own company?
- [17:07]
B
Is this being recorded? No, of course it is.
- [17:12]
A
Just desire. I didn't say plans.
- [17:14]
B
No, no, for sure. But I absolutely. I think when we're talking about platforms and what it needs to do, but bringing technology to market and walking like there is definitely, from a nimbleness and a speed perspective, I think that we can serve a market in a way that can accelerate. So those accelerators, like, we're at vive right now.
- [17:30]
A
Right.
- [17:31]
B
Those accelerators are beasts in the market because they can go so fast. So sometimes it's just a matter of being able to build an accelerator to complement ye.
- [17:38]
A
Yeah.
- [17:38]
B
Yeah.
- [17:39]
A
So, yeah. Well, thank you so much for being on the program, Nancy.
- [17:42]
B
It's been so much fun.
- [17:43]
A
It's been terrific. And this is Ed Gaudette from the Risk Never Sleeps podcast. If you're on the front lines protecting patient safety and delivering patient care, remember to stay vigilant because Risk never sleeps. Thanks for listening to Risk Never Sleeps for the show, notes, resources and more information and how to transform the protection of patient safety. Visit us at. That's C-E N S I N E T dot com. I'm your host, Ed Gaudet. And until next time, stay vigilant because Risk never Sleeps.