Welcome to “Meet the Innovators,” a story series showcasing leaders and frontline change agents within HCA Healthcare’s Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I) division. Learn how they got to where they are today and how they’re helping shape the future of patient-centered care.
Meet Laura
We’ve all had similar experiences when upcoming change was announced: You have to learn a new technology or process, work with a new team, or do something different. How was it? Did you feel accepted and supported? Did you feel uncomfortable or held back? How did it impact your experience and what were the outcomes? These are all questions Laura asks herself having experienced change. She is also committed to asking these questions of others to help them and their organizations thrive while operating in an environment of innovation and change.
Radical change in healthcare requires positive influences, sound science, strategic resources, but most importantly, listening to the voices of care team members. For Laura, change has been at the center of her existence since childhood. She has developed an understanding of change on many levels since childhood. Fluent in Portuguese, she spent a significant amount of time with relatives in Rio de Janeiro during her childhood, and has lived on both coasts of the US, in the Midwest, and now in Nashville. Frequent moves have forced her to step out of her comfort zone to meet new people, try new things, and understand the value of doing things differently, even when it is difficult or uncomfortable. The ability to navigate change and help others do so is in her DNA.
For Laura Bermudez, these formative experiences instilled in her a deep appreciation for different people and perspectives and laid the foundation for her future work at HCA Healthcare as vice president of change management and communications in the Care Transformation and Innovation (CT&I) division.
A career based in medicine leads to healthcare
Laura was raised by dedicated parents who were both physicians, and their passion for medicine played a key role in her development. Her parents’ passion for their work inspired her to want to find a career that she could be just as passionate about. “My mom and dad really encouraged me to find a career that didn’t feel like work, something I was passionate about. My main goal was to wake up every day and do something that I was excited about,” she says.
Laura studied at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, and initially planned to become a secondary education teacher. However, a team dynamics class sparked a new interest. “I was intrigued by the notion that organizations are living organisms and the impact people have on their culture and outcomes,” she explains. That realization led her to change her major to human and organizational development, a decision that would significantly alter the career path she had been pursuing.
After graduating, she studied the retail and financial industries where she gained valuable experience in team dynamics, leadership, change management, customer service and organizational growth. Laura solidified her expertise while working for a professional services firm for seven years, leading change management initiatives for multi-industry organizations with a focus on organizational design, stakeholder engagement and leadership alignment.
In 2015, HCA Healthcare offered Laura the opportunity to apply her organizational change management experience to a familiar yet professionally challenging field. “I’m intrigued by and tend to gravitate towards problems that are hard to solve,” Laura explains. “The issues facing healthcare today are complex and multifaceted. Add in my family ties and the move felt like a natural fit.”
Her initial role evolved over time, ultimately leading to the opportunity to influence how people experience change across HCA Healthcare with the launch of CT&I in 2021. As AVP of Change Management and Communications for CT&I over the past three years, she has driven tremendous growth around the change function, fostered leaders and facilities’ ability to lead their own change, and provided effective communications strategies 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 continually working to innovate and develop healthcare solutions that improve the care experience for both patients and providers. Fundamental to the success of any CT&I technology or process initiative is collaborating with clinicians and keeping their input top of mind. Laura’s Change Management and Communications team does this while supporting a growing list of innovative solutions aimed at digitally transforming care delivery and reducing the administrative burden for care team members.
The current list of technology solutions supported by Laura and the CT&I Change Management and Communications team includes Timpani, Augmedix Go and Nurse Handoff.
Timpani scheduling and staffing solution is a clinical workforce management platform that provides transparency and balanced schedules for HCA Healthcare care team members. To date, Timpani has been deployed in approximately 50 HCA Healthcare facilities, with plans to deploy in approximately 90 more by the end of 2025. Augmedix Go is an ambient medical recording tool designed to help physicians more quickly and easily record important medical information from conversations during patient encounters. A pilot program is currently underway with approximately 80 emergency department physicians at four HCA Healthcare facilities. Nurse Handover is an AI-driven technology solution designed by our nurses for nurses in partnership with Google Cloud that distills the most relevant patient data identified by nurses into an automatically generated report. With over 60,000 nurse handovers taking place daily across all HCA Healthcare facilities, the tool is intended to support seamless and streamlined handovers between nurses during shift changes. Proof-of-concept testing and pilots of the nurse handover tool are being conducted at four HCA Healthcare hospitals, with 89% of participating nurses rating the tool as useful.
Adopting new technology is always difficult for organizations in any industry. Dr. Schlosser believes change management is a key element to HCA Healthcare’s success in its transformation journey. In his view, design flaws are not the problem when new technology is shelved or workarounds are put in place. Failure occurs when organizations do not put in the appropriate effort to drive the changes required to implement new technology or processes. Laura believes that organizations can offer the best solutions in the world, but if adoption and utilization are not realized, the desired results will not be achieved. She states, “We know that our leaders and care team members have many challenges every day. At CT&I, we believe it is our responsibility to make sure that the people impacted by what we do are well supported and equipped to succeed.”
Related Article: Meet the Innovator: Emergency Medicine Physician Uses Groundbreaking Technology and AI to Improve the Lives of Patients and Caregivers – HCA Healthcare Today
Partners to work with in times of change
The collaboration CT&I has established with HCA Healthcare’s Innovation Hubs is helping the organization achieve its goal of transforming healthcare. Based within HCA Healthcare’s hospitals, the Innovation Hubs provide a vibrant environment for CT&I’s work.
Because change happens at the local level, connecting directly with hub care teams and leaders to get honest feedback about both the excitement and challenges of a particular change through an iterative process of discovery, design, and testing allows Laura’s team to embrace learning on an individual level and scale it across the enterprise. “Laura really embodies the CT&I approach where our team is one with the end users – our care team members,” explains Dr. Schlosser.
“Through the relationships that Laura and her team have built, we are able to hear and learn directly from the end users of our new products,” adds Dr. Schlosser. They are rub shoulders with our physicians, nurses and leaders. This is how we continue to build transformative technology solutions.”
Overcoming the challenges of change
Laura’s innovative approach to change is characterized by a deep understanding that change is complex, but navigating it must be accessible to those involved. She defines change management as the intentional discipline of supporting and equipping people to deliver organizational success and results.
‘One of the most difficult things in the field of healthcare transformation is taking a complex and often ambiguous subject and boiling it down to something simple and concrete,’ she acknowledges, ‘however, this step is essential to get stakeholders to understand and embrace the importance of the human dimension of the change.’ Laura loves a challenge, so this ability to simplify complexity while always keeping the voice of the end user top of mind is a hallmark of her leadership style.
Dr. Schlosser commented on Laura’s key strengths: “Her focus on stakeholder engagement and leadership alignment is key to challenging existing thinking and practices within organizations and driving successful change. She is extremely good at bridging the gap between theory and the actual implementation of change management strategies on a product-by-product, hospital-by-hospital basis.”
As the speed and scope of change grows across the healthcare industry, it’s paramount that HCA Healthcare continues to improve its ability to adapt to change across the enterprise. Ultimately, in the future, change will need to be everyone’s job, not just an isolated effort limited to project teams or specialized practitioners. Building a change management mindset and skillset together with our colleagues will be key to transforming healthcare.
Advice from an innovator
Change is inevitable for organizations and their employees. With effective change management leadership at the helm, organizations are positioned to not only survive, but thrive. HCA Healthcare is committed to caring for and improving lives, and we’re constantly evolving our healthcare services to better meet patient needs. And that, of course, means change.
Laura’s vision for the future of change management at HCA Healthcare is focused on developing what she calls “change athletes” – people who know how to participate in change and who hone their skills by practicing it frequently.
Laura shares some words of change management wisdom with all current and future change agents:
“Instead of just accepting change, focus on ways you and others can be active participants in the change. By improving the ways our employees influence and experience innovation, we will be in the best position to change health care for the better.”
Laura Bermudez, Vice President, Change Management and Communications;
Care transformation and innovation
