Meet the Innovators: Leading healthcare transformation, one change at a time

Meet Laura

We’ve all been there when an upcoming change is announced. You need to learn a new technology or process, work with a new team or do something different. How did that go? Did you feel included and supported? Did you feel uncomfortable or reticent? How did that affect your experience and what was the outcome? These are all questions Laura asks herself when experiencing a change. She also is committed to asking these questions to others, to ensure they and their organizations are successful while operating in an environment of innovation and change.

Transformational change in the healthcare space requires positive influence, the right science and strategic resources, but most importantly, listening to the voices of our care team members. Since her childhood days, change has been central to Laura’s being. Her upbringing instilled in her an appreciation for change on many levels: she is fluent in Portuguese, spent considerable time with extended family in Rio de Janeiro during her youth and has lived on both U.S. coasts, the Midwest and now Nashville. Frequent moves pushed her out of her comfort zone to meet new people, try new things and gain appreciation for the value of doing things differently — even when it’s hard or uncomfortable. Her ability to navigate change and to help others do so is in her DNA.

For Laura Bermudez, these formative experiences ingrained in her a deep appreciation for different people and perspectives, laying the foundation for her future with HCA Healthcare as associate vice president of change management and communications for our department of Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I).

Rooted in medicine, career moves lead to healthcare

Laura was raised by a mother and father who were both dedicated physicians, and their passion for medicine played a pivotal role in her development. Her parents’ enthusiasm for their work fueled Laura’s desire to find a profession to which she could be equally dedicated. “My mom and dad really inspired me to find a career that I was passionate about, so it wouldn’t feel like work. Doing something I would be excited to wake up and pursue every day was my key objective,” she says.

Laura’s educational journey took her to Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, where she initially intended to become a secondary education teacher. A class on team dynamics, however, sparked a new interest. “I was intrigued by the concept of organizations as living, breathing organisms and the impact that people have on organizational cultures and outcomes,” she explains. That realization led her to switch majors to Human and Organizational Development, a decision that would dramatically shift her intended career path.

Post-graduation, she explored the retail and financial industries, where she gained valuable experience in team dynamics, leadership, managing change, customer service and organizational growth. Laura solidified her niche while spending seven years with a professional services company, leading multi-industry organizational change management initiatives with a focus in organizational design, stakeholder engagement and leadership alignment.

In 2015, Laura was offered an opportunity to leverage her organizational change management background in a sector that was familiar, yet professionally challenging — at HCA Healthcare. “I tend to be intrigued by and gravitate toward the hard problems to solve,” Laura explains. “The issues facing healthcare today are complex and multifaceted. That, combined with my family connection, made the move feel like a natural fit.”

Her initial role evolved over time, ultimately leading her to an opportunity to impact how people experience change across HCA Healthcare with the launch of CT&I in 2021. In the past three years as CT&I’s AVP of change management and communications, she has driven tremendous growth around change capabilities, nurturing our leaders’ and facilities’ ability to lead change themselves and delivering a successful communications strategy to support these efforts.

Transforming healthcare through successful change management

Under the leadership of Dr. Michael Schlosser, senior vice president of Care Transformation and Innovation, the CT&I team is continuously working to innovate and develop healthcare solutions that improve the care experience for both patient and provider. Fundamental to the success of any CT&I technology or process initiative is partnering with our clinicians, keeping their voices front and center. Laura’s change management and communications team does this as they support a growing list of innovative solutions aimed at digitally transforming care delivery and removing administrative burden from care team members.

Among the growing list of technology solutions currently supported by Laura and the CT&I change management and communications team are Timpani, Augmedix Go and Nurse Handoff.

• Timpani scheduling and staffing solution is a clinical labor management platform designed to deliver more transparent and balanced schedules for HCA Healthcare’s care team members. With Timpani in place at nearly 50 HCA Healthcare facilities to date, plans are in place for implementation at nearly 90 additional locations by the end of 2025.

• Augmedix Go is an ambient medical documentation tool designed to help physicians more quickly and easily document key medical information from conversations during patient visits. The pilot is currently underway with approximately 80 emergency room physicians at four HCA Healthcare facilities.

• Nurse handoff, an AI-driven technology solution designed by our nurses for nurses in collaboration with Google Cloud, distills the most relevant patient data identified by nurses into an auto-generated report. With more than 60,000 nurse handoffs occurring daily across all HCA Healthcare facilities, this tool aims to support seamless, streamlined nurse-to-nurse handoffs during shift change. Proof of concept testing and pilots for the nurse handoff tool are taking place at four HCA Healthcare hospitals, with 89% of participating nurses rating the tool as helpful.

Adopting new technologies is consistently challenging for organizations across any industry, and Dr. Schlosser sees change management as the key ingredient to ensuring HCA Healthcare succeeds in its transformation journey. His perspective is that when new technologies end up sitting on the shelf or getting worked around, design flaws are not typically the pain point. The point of failure is when organizations don’t put the right effort into driving the changes required to implement new technologies or processes. Laura believes an organization can offer the best solutions in the world, but if adoption and utilization are never realized, the desired outcome will never be achieved. She says, “We know our leaders and care team members have a lot on their plates every day and, within CT&I, we see our ourselves as responsible for ensuring the people impacted by anything we’re doing are well supported and equipped to be successful.”

Related article: Meet the Innovators: Emergency medicine physician leverages innovative technology and AI to make life better for patients and providers – HCA Healthcare Today

Elbow to elbow partners in change

The collaborative partnerships CT&I has established with HCA Healthcare’s Innovation Hubs are what enable the organization to deliver on its goal to transform healthcare. Innovation Hubs, based inside of HCA Healthcare hospitals, provide a living environment for CT&I’s work.

Change happens at the local level, so connecting with care teams and leaders directly at the hubs — through an iterative discovery, design and testing process — to get candid feedback on what is both exciting and challenging about specific changes allows Laura’s team to embrace learning at the individual level that can be scaled across the entire enterprise. “Laura very much exemplifies the CT&I approach, which entails our team embedding with the end users — our care team members,” explains Dr. Schlosser.

“Through the relationships Laura and her team have developed, we are able to hear and learn directly from the end users of new products,” adds Dr. Schlosser. They are elbow to elbow with our doctors, nurses and leaders. This is how we will continue to build our transformative technology solutions.”

Navigating the challenges of change

Laura’s innovative approach to change is characterized by a deep understanding that, while change is complex, navigating it must be relatable to those involved. She defines change management as an intentional discipline that supports and equips people to realize organizational success and outcomes.

“One of the hardest parts of being in the healthcare transformation space is taking complex, often ambiguous subject matter and distilling it into something simple and tangible,” she admits. “This step is critical, though, to getting our stakeholders to appreciate and buy into the importance of the people side of change.” Because Laura loves a challenge, this ability to simplify complexity — while keeping the end user’s voice front and center — is a hallmark of her leadership style.

Dr. Schlosser says about Laura’s key strengths, “Her focus on stakeholder engagement and leadership alignment has been key to driving successful change, challenging existing mindsets and practices within the organization. She is incredibly good at bridging the gap between theory and actually implementing change management strategy on a product-by-product and hospital-by-hospital basis.”

While the speed and scope of change increases across the healthcare landscape, it is paramount that HCA Healthcare continues to build its enterprise-wide aptitude for change. Ultimately, the future requires change to be everyone’s job, not a separate exercise limited to project teams and specialized practitioners. Building the change management mindset and skillset alongside our colleagues is the key to transforming healthcare.

Advice from the innovator

Change is inevitable for organizations and their people. With the guiding force of capable change management leadership at the helm, organizations are well-positioned to not just survive but thrive. With HCA Healthcare’s commitment to the care and improvement of human life comes constant evolution of healthcare delivery to better meet patient needs. And that, of course, means change.

Laura’s vision for the future of change management at HCA Healthcare is centered on building what she calls “change athletes” — people who know how to participate in change and build that muscle by practicing often. 

Laura offers this piece of change management wisdom to all present and future agents of change: