I’ve spent more than 13 years working in healthcare, and I’ve had the chance to see it from a lot of different angles. I’ve worked in med-surg, the ER, ICU, home health, hospice, case management, and healthcare operations. Every setting is different, but one thing has been pretty consistent: there is often a big difference between how something is supposed to work and how it actually works once it reaches the people taking care of patients.
That has always interested me.
Early in my nursing career, I was the person who wanted to understand the technology, the workflows, and why certain systems were built the way they were. I was involved during the transition from paper processes to electronic records and later became a super user in systems like Cerner and Epic. I liked being the person who could understand both sides of the problem: what the system was trying to accomplish and what the clinician actually needed to get through the day.
Sometimes those two things lined up. Sometimes they absolutely did not.
Over the years, I started paying more attention to why certain products, processes, and technologies were adopted while others struggled. It was rarely just about whether the idea was good. A product could solve a real problem and still fail because it did not fit the workflow, because implementation was poor, because the wrong people were involved in the decision, or because nobody had really asked the people who would be using it every day.
That became even more interesting to me as healthcare technology and AI started moving faster.
I’ve spent a lot of time over the past few years learning more about AI, automation, workflow, and healthcare technology, but I keep coming back to the same question: what happens when this actually reaches the clinical environment?
That is where I think nurses bring something that is difficult to replace.
We know where the friction is because we have lived in it. We know which problems are real problems and which ones sound important in a conference room but barely matter in practice. We also know how quickly a “small” workflow change can turn into a major problem when you are managing several patients, documentation, medications, families, communication, staffing issues, and everything else happening at once.
That is one of the reasons NurseApproved immediately made sense to me.
The idea behind the NurseApproved Seal is straightforward: healthcare products should be evaluated by practicing nurses who understand the environment where those products are actually going to be used. The evaluation is independent, the nurses are matched to the appropriate specialty and setting, and products have to meet a real standard.
But what interested me just as much was everything happening around that core idea.
NurseApproved is also working with companies through advisory services, building educational programs, supporting nurse entrepreneurs, and creating a larger presence for nurses at major healthcare conferences and industry events. It is not just about reviewing products. It is about getting clinical expertise involved earlier and in more places.
That is where I see my role fitting.
I enjoy the space between clinical care, operations, product, and business. I like talking with founders and understanding what they are trying to build. I like looking at a workflow and figuring out where it may break. I like thinking about implementation, adoption, communication, and what has to happen after the meeting for something to actually move forward.
Business development is part of that too.
For a healthcare company, having a clinically useful product is only part of the challenge. They still have to explain the value, build trust, get the right people involved, navigate healthcare organizations, and show that what they built makes sense in the real world.
Nurses can add a tremendous amount of value in those conversations, and I think there is still a lot of untapped opportunity there.
What I like about NurseApproved is that it treats nursing experience as expertise that can influence product strategy, business decisions, purchasing, implementation, and innovation. That is a much broader view of what nurses can contribute, and it is one I strongly agree with.
I’m excited to join Rebecca and the rest of the NurseApproved team and continue learning where I can be most useful as the company grows.
For me, this is a chance to bring together a lot of things I’ve spent my career interested in: nursing, healthcare operations, technology, workflow, implementation, and the business side of healthcare.
And I’m excited to see where that leads.