Nashville, Tenn.-based HCA Healthcare is bolstering its technology leadership as its digital innovation department has grown from a “startup team to a scaled operation,” a new executive told Becker’s.
The 190-hospital system appointed Whitney Staub-Juergens, DNP, RN, its inaugural vice president and COO of digital transformation and innovation in early January. She envisions her job as “creating clarity, reducing friction, and building the structural calm that allows innovation to scale responsibly,” she posted on LinkedIn.
Becker’s connected with Dr. Staub-Juergens, who started at HCA in 2016 on the clinical side, to learn more about her goals for the position and the technology direction of the nation’s largest for-profit health system. She reports to Michael Schlosser, MD, senior vice president and chief transformation officer.
Question: As you said, your new role emphasizes “creating clarity” and “reducing friction” around innovation. What specific operational challenges are you prioritizing first, and how will you measure progress in these areas?
Dr. Whitney Staub-Juergens: HCA Healthcare’s Department of Digital Transformation and Innovation has grown from a startup team to a scaled operation, creating the need for a senior operating partner who can pair disciplined operations with the agility and speed required to innovate and advance digital healthcare across the organization’s network of care.
In this role, I’m focused on priorities that will strengthen both our strategy and our investments. We’re enhancing the DT&I operating model to support multiple strategic domains and use cases at scale. This includes using technology to streamline how we work, advancing enterprise strategies such as value tracking and change management, and ensuring a coordinated working environment that delivers measurable impact.
Additionally, as we continue to develop products that serve the broader HCA Healthcare community, I’m focusing on organizational and cultural development within DT&I to create an environment where top technology talent can build solutions with real human impact.
Q: HCA Healthcare has invested heavily in digital capabilities, including data analytics, AI and telehealth. How do you see these technologies reshaping care delivery and clinician workflows in the next 12-24 months?
WSJ: When I see care delivery in clinical workflows, I focus on administrative and cognitive burden placed on care teams, and AI has immediate potential to alleviate both of those by automating key administrative tasks.
HCA Healthcare’s Nurse Handoff, an AI-generated digital nurse handoff tool that leverages large language models to automate and enhance the shift report process, is a prime model of alleviating administrative burden. Currently, in hospitals around the country nurses, physicians and other clinicians must go into an electronic health record simply to retrieve information and assemble the information in a way that makes sense for them to then execute care throughout their shift. That act of collecting information, which can take over an hour of time alone, is a great example of how AI, and specifically the Nurse Handoff tool, can alleviate healthcare’s administrative burden.
Another area where AI shows significant potential is clinical decision support, which provides the right insights at the right time to the right clinician to help alleviate the cognitive burden. A great example is the work we’re doing in maternal-fetal risk management to streamline subjective, manual patient assessments; improve care variability, risk identification and intervention times; and reduce back charting and associated inefficiencies.
Q: You’ve had a long career journey from nursing and clinical operations into digital leadership at HCA. How has your clinical background informed your approach to leading transformation at scale?
WSJ: My clinical background allows me to lead digital transformation in a way that’s grounded in how hospitals realistically operate. I’m fluent in both clinical care and technology, which is critical in healthcare, where complexity, safety and operational realities can’t be abstracted away. That dual perspective helps us bridge clinicians and technologists and build solutions that work in real-world hospital environments.
Throughout my journey at HCA Healthcare — from the early days of DT&I to my current role as COO — my focus has been bringing technology to the bedside, not forcing the bedside to adapt to technology. We systematically integrate our nurses and physicians’ voices into every solution we build, something we’re very passionate about. Solutions like Nurse Handoff, designed by nurses for nurses, reflect our commitment to human-centered, clinician-led design where the people doing the work are part of creating the solution.
Innovation Hubs are how we responsibly scale that approach. Hospitals are, by necessity, risk-averse environments, but innovation requires safe spaces to test and learn. Our Innovation Hubs, including our first at UCF Lake Nona Hospital, provide realistic clinical settings where care teams and technologists can collaboratively test AI and digital solutions under our Responsible AI framework. That ability to pilot, refine and validate technology in live care environments has been a game changer in accelerating transformation while protecting patient safety.
Q: Culture and adoption are often bigger barriers than technology itself. What strategies will you use to ensure that front-line clinicians and staff are engaged and empowered as digital tools are deployed systemwide?
WSJ: HCA Healthcare leads by fostering a strong culture of innovation across our hospitals. Bringing digital and AI strategy to the bedside and designing the Nurse Handoff solution demonstrates how we incorporate the voices of actively practicing nurses, those who deliver hands-on patient care every day, to build solutions that work. When developing the Nurse Handoff model, we tapped into 21 nurses across four hospitals to develop a solution for nurses, by nurses. Additionally, we gained critical insights on how to most effectively support nurses during this critical mode of shift-to-shift handoff communication.
Operationalizing a product like Nurse Handoff is the very essence of end users leading the design, which is something unique to HCA Healthcare. We bring the technology to the hospital and make space for nurses and all care team members to shape innovation. Our Innovation Hub structure provides the optimum environment for nurses to focus on that important work and key to our solution.
Q: Looking ahead, what does “responsible innovation” mean to you in healthcare — particularly around AI and automation — and how are you balancing patient safety, efficiency, and ethical considerations?
WSJ: For us, responsible innovation means designing AI that is safe, scalable and clinically accountable from Day 1. HCA Healthcare’s Responsible AI framework ensures every AI solution is rigorously tested, ethically governed and always deployed with a human in the loop.
We embed patient safety and quality best practices directly into the architecture of our digital platforms. In areas like maternal-fetal risk management, AI is used to reduce cognitive and administrative burden on clinicians, enabling more consistent, data-driven decision-making at the point of care.
Equally important is making large-scale innovation safer and more predictable. Every AI use case is reviewed through a cross-functional governance model that integrates clinical leadership, compliance, and technology expertise. As COO, my focus is translating AI strategy into operational reality — balancing speed and innovation with the rigor required to earn trust, protect patients, and deliver measurable outcomes across the enterprise.
