Making Healthcare Work Better: Strategic Integration, Automation & Mentorship with Michelle McClay

In this episode of The Interconnectedness of Things, hosts Emily Nava and Dr. Andrew Hutson sit down with Michelle McClay, Chief Strategic Integration Officer at Ascension, to explore how healthcare systems can work smarter—without losing their human touch.

Michelle brings over a decade of experience in strategic project management and shares her insights on:

• How automation can support, but not replace healthcare professionals
• Why the future of healthcare hinges on collaboration and interdependence between teams
• The vital role of data in decision-making (and how to avoid data overwhelm)
• Creating a culture of mentorship, feedback, and early career development
• What she wishes she'd known at the start of her career—and what she tells young professionals now

Whether you're in healthcare, tech, or team leadership, this episode is a must-listen for anyone navigating change, complexity, and human connection in the workplace.

About "The Interconnectedness of Things"
Welcome to "The Interconnectedness of Things," where hosts Dr. Andrew Hutson and Emily Nava explore the ever-evolving landscape of technology, innovation, and how these forces shape our world. Each episode dives deep into the critical topics of enterprise solutions, AI, document management, and more, offering insights and practical advice for businesses and tech enthusiasts alike.

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Transcript

00:03 Hello, and welcome back to another episode of the Interconnectness of Things, the podcast where we explore the intersections of technology, innovation, and human connection.
00:13 I'm your host, Emily Nava, alongside Dr. Andrew Hudson, and today we're diving into a critical conversation about how technology, automation, and knowledge sharing are shaping the future of healthcare operations and workforce development.
00:26 Joining us today, we're very excited to have Michelle McClay, Chief Strategic Integration Officer at Ascension, joining us. She has a wealth of experience and project management, strategic integration and team development, and she's here to share her insights.
00:41 Uh, Michelle, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Happy to be here. Of course. Um, so we're going to go ahead and jump right in.
00:49 Um, for those of you that don't know you, tell us a little bit about yourself and what you're about the work you're doing at Ascension.
00:56 Yeah, it's great. Well, as you said, I'm privileged to be a part of Ascension, which has a wonderful mission helping people who really need help care.
01:05 I've been there for 13 years and got to do a lot of wonderful things. In my current role, I'm responsible for leading project management across Ascension and many of our strategic projects that support our strategic plan and the goals that Ascension has.
01:20 Um, I'm blessed to work with a wonderful team of project managers, and we get to do a lot of great work for the organization.
01:27 Uh, personally, I have a fiance and a dog and they are fantastic too, so I want to not forget about them as well.
01:34 Totally. Congrats on the engagement. Thank you. All right. That's so good. Yeah, go ahead, Dr. Eson. Well, Michelle, you know, you and I have been learning each other a long time.
01:45 Uh, can I call you Michelle still? Or is it? Okay. Yeah. Okay. Okay. Um, you know, throughout our careers, we've stayed in touch and we've talked a lot about the role that Dana can have in decision making, whether it's at the point of care.
02:05 It's a capital project. Uh, it is behind the scenes working on snow med. Classifications for reimbursement.
02:18 Uh, could you share just a little bit about how you think about the role of data in your career now, and maybe even over the span of those 13 years at Ascension?
02:30 Yeah, definitely. And I think you continue to learn this along the way in your career, but data is everywhere and it's so important.
02:38 And I think data is really how you get things done. When you think about certainly from a tech perspective, you need data, but from a business perspective, think about wanting to start a new program or make a change in a current program, whatever you're trying to accomplish, there's probably someone 
02:54 above you who needs to make a decision to approve that or not. And how do you sell your case? How do you make that happen?
03:01 You really need data to support that. So I think about it is if we need to get something done, there's probably going to be a component that data has within that to be able to achieve those goals.
03:13 That's awesome. All those like, uh, kits terms start to crop up in my head of you can't respect what you don't inspect that you can't manage what you can't measure.
03:25 Right. All those fun little phrases that you pick up over time because it becomes so true. So that's awesome how you're thinking about data isn't just a commodity that's out there.
03:37 It's really critical to make it a part of your everyday. Right. Um, and then you said, you know, you learn this along the way in your career.
03:48 Have you found that the amount of data? The variety of data has kind of stabilized, or is it growing, shrinking?
03:59 What do you think is happening with it? Yeah, in my opinion, it's growing and we talk a lot about this.
04:05 We have so much data. Do we have too much data that we actually can't use? Or we actually even using the data that we have?
04:12 And oftentimes it's not a lack of data. It's usable data that actually helps us make the decisions that we need to make.
04:20 I think there is such a thing as if you have too much in front of you and you really can't easily distill that to what you're trying to achieve.
04:27 That's also a problem, maybe equally or even more so, but not having enough of the data. So that's where I've seen it gone in my experience.
04:35 We are great We get finding new data. Certainly there's opportunities. I assume in other organizations as well with cleanliness and those different data sources.
04:44 But how do you actually use all of the data? How do you parse through what data is actually helpful and be able to manipulate that in a way where it can actually help you fully achieve whatever you're trying to achieve and you're not overwhelmed by the sheer amount of data that is there.
05:00 You can actually get through it and make it useful. That really starts to, uh, for some reason, uh, I would, it sparked your story there, a story around one of the first nuclear plants.
05:14 And it was, it was, it wasn't Chernobyl, but maybe it was three mile island and they were, uh, not suffering for alerts that there were so many alarms going off that they couldn't figure out which one to even look at.
05:30 And then that led to the downfall. So that makes me, that scenario reminded me of what you're saying. We're not suffering for amounts of data.
05:41 We have so much now, we have to try to figure out the signal for the noise. What's actually important? How do we parse through that?
05:48 So, that's a great kind of a, a lead-in to my next question for you. If you could throw your imagination in, and I'm not going to hold you to anything you imagine on this podcast, or just having fun.
06:03 The perfect scenario. If you could have whatever you wanted at your fingertips, what kind of information would you want to help you make a decision?
06:13 And then how would that help you and your team on your day-to-day? Yeah, that's a great question. We're just imagining things and let's be crazy about it and put some wild stuff out there.
06:24 That's fun. A lot of the stuff that we work on, business-wise, process improvement-wise, even projects, starts with a question of some sort.
06:35 How can we increase our rates here? How can we take care of more patients? How can we reduce costs? Whatever the question is.
06:44 What if there was a way to just type in that question to something? Dr. Hudson will figure that out. And then it will give us the answer based on just a very simple question.
06:56 Maybe that already exists if it does, I sure haven't seen it. But using all of the data that surround us, because usually that's the work that we're doing right now.
07:04 We have a question and then we just go a million different ways from this question. We eventually end up circling back to the question, but I think about how much time and energy Has is spent really trying to see what all the other possibilities are out there, and eventually we get back to the end result
07:21 . If I had to dream of anything, that's, that's what it would be. Start with the That's an awesome dream. Somehow really get to a quick answer.
07:29 That's awesome. I want to be in that dream with you for sure. And I think folks are trying to tackle this in a bunch of different ways.
07:36 So when you and I were cutting our teeth back in graduate school, they were just starting To look at natural language processing in our department and how that could apply in healthcare.
07:49 Um, fast forward, we got a lot of stuff like generative AI that is attempting to go through that. But even before we got to the world of chat GPT, you could get things like Power BI from Microsoft and pose that question.
08:06 And then you were exactly right. Who knows what result we would get. And that's what makes it a dream right now rather than, well, yeah, we've already figured that out.
08:18 Because we start to see how difficult it is to actually translate what we're meaning and then be able to go to our data to actually get that out.
08:33 Much less make a recommendation of how we should interpret it to help us with the question that's been posed. So I do think in the next ten years or so you might be living the dream.
08:49 Wonderful. There's a lot of work being done right now to organize information in a way that can be easily traversed by these very powerful probability machines, also known as large language models, where it is Pulling in the information that you have in context, combining it with the question that you're
09:16 asking, and giving you the highest probable response available. Why that's hard today and why you and I couldn't hop on chat GPT and say, how do I fix healthcare and get a meaningful result?
09:32 Uh, it's not trained on that data, and it's not focused on that data. So that context that you bring in, that thing that you and your team are working on constantly, that data that you use to make a decision needs to be constructed in a way that can be attached to these powerful probability machines 
09:53 so that you can start to get that actual valuable insight. Very cool stuff. Thanks for going down the imagination path with me.
10:01 I knew you wouldn't disappoint. Always awesome. So, could I change gears a little bit? Of course. Alright, so we talked about the perfect world where we can ask a single question and we get a perfect response back.
10:16 One of the things that comes to mind when I'm thinking about pulling that and creating that future is the interdependent nature of teams.
10:28 That and you and I remember this. We went and did some research on Memna, who said there is externalization of knowledge, internalization of knowledge, and then this informal socialization that happens back and forth.
10:43 A lot of the data that we talked about is getting exported and imported with that internal and external, but then there's that sharing and that knowledge, that interdependence between teams that you grow.
10:54 How do you guys think about that? And, and how do you try to take advantage of the tacit knowledge that you've built up over time on the projects that you tackle?
11:05 Yeah, and that really is a huge part of why my team exists. Our job is to help any strategic project that needs to be implemented, actually get implemented in an accelerated fashion and meet the goals.
11:19 To do that in an organization, the more that you know about people, the more that you know about how the company actually operates, more of that qualitative side of the house.
11:29 Certainly coupling that with the hard facts and the data is helpful. So part of what my team is able to deliver is the building upon building the snowballing of the institutional knowledge that we are able then to bring back to any project connected to two or three or four things that we did before.
11:48 We saw how that played out. We saw how this stakeholder interacted for this problem and resulted in this solution because we have that institutional knowledge.
11:58 We can then deliver great value to the organization and don't have to have the ramp up for that. If you think about bringing in an external consultant as an example, they're going to have to learn everything new each time.
12:12 So there is immense value in our team and the work that we do actually I'm able to support and create linkages between the different teams.
12:21 Even though we all work in the same company and I assume this might be true at your organization as well and many others, you work within your team and it's so easy to be in a silo.
12:31 My team does that from a very process. I wonder if there's a way that we do that and what you all are doing from a non-people non-process perspective.
12:45 I think there is, and even even from the person perspective and you think about how your team grows that knowledge.
12:54 I'm curious if there's been any tactics that you've used to accelerate, so like you bring in a new person dedicated, how do we get them ingrained with the snowball without being crushed by it?
13:10 Absolutely. And that requires intentionality, but it is totally doable. So first, we always make sure that we have a buddy.
13:19 Like, you have to use the knowledge that you have at hand. So when we're staffing a new person on a project, let's say, they're going to have an oversight or a lead who's done this before to be able to share.
13:28 Even if they're not fully dedicated, every single person knows exactly who they can go to to ask those questions to talk something through to get some of that institutional knowledge that they might The second part of that is, I have to start that one over.
13:58 Michelle, you've frozen on us. And the second thing along with that is you also have to write that down. You have to make sure that you have a resource through onboarding through training that your new people can access, that they can say, okay, who are those people to go to?
14:20 Here's a statement. Okay, cool. They're mad. Here's even something as simple as a directorate. Here's what this person is responsible for.
14:27 You also have to have tangible resources that they can go to in addition to those people connections to help them get on board if that's snowballing an institutional knowledge and make it easy for them to really ramp up their knowledge as they begin.
14:41 What are some of the habits that you have your team follow as their Working along and making sure that they're building that corpus of resources for the next round, the next generation that's coming in, if you will.
14:56 Absolutely. And thankfully with the work that we do, the Nature Project Management, it is very detailed, it is very standard.
15:04 Our job is to bring in standards, consistency, A consistent way of doing things, managing projects, reporting on projects. So to answer that question, it's very easy for us because that's also the nature of what we do.
15:17 Um, so as an example, whenever we start a project, we'll have the same kind of kickoff conversation. What's the goal?
15:24 Who are the stakeholders? What do we need to know? The same way when we end a project, we have an introspection.
15:30 What went well? What did not go well? What do we need to capture down and adjust before we do another one of these projects?
15:36 That is just something that we have built the habits of doing. Another thing is also templates. Again, these are simple things.
15:43 This is really project management 101, but when you're doing this kind of work, it's really important. Every template that we can have agendas, documents, slides, whatever that may be, we have those in one repository so that people can easily access them.
15:59 And again, that's efficient. That saves some time when you can go back to something you know where it is and you're already 10, 20% of the way starting when you're working on something new for the first time.
16:10 That predictable, that consistent, that reliable set that you can go to every time I think is so critical. And hard for a lot of teams to build a habit and keep that habit.
16:22 Um, you know, we work with a lot of people over time and just different personalities show up differently with those that level of detail.
16:29 And it certainly is helpful if they join your team with the expectation that, no, this, this is a project management.
16:37 This is the way in which we are going to project manage. Now are those some of the things that you've learned over time, with that team, or did you just right out of the gate and knew what to do?
16:49 Let's say right out of the gate, we knew what to do, and I think a big reason for that is the kind of people you hire.
16:56 Like to want to do projects, you'll, our gift, I tell my team, is our gift needs to be that we are bringing consistency and that we're bringing standards.
17:05 The people that we are working with, whatever the project may be, that might not be the gift that they're bringing.
17:10 They're responsible for whatever the project is, whatever the goal is. Our gift and the ability to serve this organization and those who are serving the patients, the customers, has to be the standardization consistency and hospitality that we bring.
17:25 My team and I talk about how can we make the persons like easier that we are sitting across from? That is our job.
17:30 And so when you can start from that humility and you hire people who are naturally going to want to follow templates, be detailed, oriented, really do this type of work, that connection between those two things can be really beautiful.
17:44 That's awesome. We talk a lot about giving yourself an identity, not just accomplishing a goal. So you introduced a great why we do this.
17:57 And you tied that with folks that naturally inclined to support the how. And it also seems like they've internalized, well, I am the type of person that makes sure I show up great for the people we serve.
18:11 And I think that that tie back to identity is really important. I'm wondering the nature of working with patients and with all the people that you get to work with and serve, what role do you see automation playing?
18:28 Do you feel like that opens the door for more things? Does it make it less human? Because you don't have the same types of interactions per chance?
18:41 Great question. I don't think it makes it less human, you know, on the end of that automation, whatever it is, for the most part, there's a human being.
18:51 Probably one of our associates in this organization who is interacting with that automation. And so we're working on lots of projects, a pretty big one right now that is dealing with how do you think about the technology transformations that need to happen?
19:05 And the biggest part of that conversation, sure, we have to make sure the technology works, but how is it going to impact that nurse?
19:12 That person in finance who's processing a bill or whatever it might be, how is it going to impact their day to day?
19:19 Is it going to make their jobs easier? That has to be the baseline outcome at the very least. We can't make their jobs harder.
19:29 And so ideally, automation is doing that. It's, it's making the jobs easier for the people who are taking that automation, whatever that is, again, to the end result of whatever your business is, in our case, serving patients, but it could be anything based on your organization.
19:44 How is that person's life easier because of what you're implementing? I think that's good. Justification behind the automation is focused on how to make something easier for someone else.
20:00 If we take that all the way till the end, even tie it back to your imagination, I type a question in.
20:08 It gives me perfect answers back immediately. I waste zero time in my research and investigation. What do you do with all that time then?
20:18 What would you imagine? If I didn't have to spend this time doing X, now that it's automated, whether that's, I get the question in perfect answers back, or there's some process running in the background that just makes magic happen, the black box of excellence.
20:34 What do you do at the time? Where would you spend your time? Well, I think we would work to make healthcare perfect, as you said earlier.
20:42 And that's the thing with healthcare. We are so far away from where we need to be from an efficiency effectiveness.
20:49 There, there's so many wonderful things that happen, but we also have so much opportunity. I'm not sure if I will see it get to a state even in my lifetime.
20:58 That's how much opportunity there is. So when you say what would you do with the time? Right now, we're so time constrained and the resource constrained is What do we have to do?
21:08 Not what would we do, and that could be a completely different conversation if we actually had the time to think about that.
21:16 That's awesome to think about. Like, listen, if you can just give us the magic bullet here with the automation and perfect access to data, that just helps me get to my backlog.
21:28 That doesn't clear my plate. That just helps me refocus. Uh, and get more done than I did before. I really like that.
21:37 Um, switching gears a little bit again. I'm sorry I'm awesome at segways. I am interested in the time that you give towards those early on in their career.
21:48 I think it's admirable the mentorship and the coaching that you offer. Your perspectives are always welcomed and insightful. I wanted to just take a few moments and kind of let your riff on What you consider uh, what advice you're considering for folks that are starting off in their career right now.
22:09 What, what are some things you wish you knew then that you know now? Absolutely. Um, and I love this question, and it's just something that's close to my heart, so I always want to have some time to talk about it, because mentorship is really fun, and one of the best blessings of my career so far has
22:26 been building teams of incredible people and seeing them grow, and that is so rewarding. And so if I think about, you know, what would I have wished we had known when you and I were in grad school way back when?
22:37 What would I wish that we have learned then? And I think the biggest one is that Everything that we do is about people.
22:43 You know, we learn, we took all these classes, we learned all these skills, all of this stuff, but we didn't learn enough, and this is the thing that stands out most to me.
22:53 Everything that we do, every project, every process initiative, it's all people doing it. So you really benefit if you can focus on understanding people, relating to people, knowing as a leader, how do you support the people around you?
23:08 You could be the most awesome employee ever, but if you have a team that isn't great, then I would say you're not the most awesome employee ever.
23:15 So it really is how do you build teams that also can grow and can give their best gifts and talents, whatever you're serving?
23:23 That is really important. So knowing that is a foundation. As I think about, what do I tell people in mentorship and giving advice?
23:31 There are a few things I think, you know, especially for early careerists, some of the things that I like to share and point out is, know that your future is really broad.
23:39 I think when you start out, your singular and like, okay, I'm gonna go get my MHA as an example, then I'm gonna be the CEO of a hospital.
23:46 And there isn't any really any other options. That's just how it works. Healthcare in itself is so broad, as is the industry is overall.
23:54 So know that it's broad, I think would kind of lessen the burden that people have, especially in their early careers, saying I have to have everything figured out.
24:02 I don't think I've had a single role where I could have expected it when I was graduating from grad school.
24:08 So you don't know what you're actually going to do. I would say also make sure you're surrounding yourself both with peers and with leaders who are actually going to give you feedback.
24:18 It's really easy to not give feedback. It's hard to give feedback, especially if it's constructed. And you need to have people who care enough about you to give you feedback because it's really hard to deliver feedback.
24:32 It's not comfortable. We don't like to do it. Most people don't like to make people's days worse, but you have to know that you have people around you who will care enough to help you out because they want you to grow and they want you to succeed.
24:46 Uh, last thing I'll say about that, vulnerability. It is a game changer. You have to be able to connect with people to be yourself and that's a journey that everyone takes differently.
24:57 Um, it's one when I first started in my career that I was like, I, I have to be a robot and everything has to be perfect and I cannot, like, really be who I am and talk about all the junk food that I eat every day and just really put it all out there.
25:11 But the more that you can truly be who you are and open that door, It allows other people to do the same.
25:17 And that has the opportunity to really create meaningful connections where wonderful things can grow from. I could not agree with you more.
25:26 I mean, this is one of the reasons why I stink your grade even all these years later when we first met.
25:33 And I, and I do agree. Like when you, when we both started, I think there was plenty of guards up being vulnerable was seen as a weakness somehow.
25:44 Uh, or it certainly was a threat. And, and I think over time learning that no, it's okay. No, everybody else is going through the same feelings you are.
25:56 Everybody else thinks it's hard. It'll be alright. And, and then also feeling that confidence when you share that with others, I think helps out a lot.
26:06 And I also agree wholeheartedly what you said about We learn these technical skills, these hard skills, the, the spreadsheets of an econ that we had to build for, um, still, I'm still traumatized by it.
26:24 Uh, for Mrs. Dr. Hicks, those, those spreadsheets. Ooh, those classes are always at 8 a.m. on Monday. Oh, yeah, yeah.
26:33 They were in the crack in the morning. We, you gotta be ready to go. Uh, I hope Dr. Hicks is listening.
26:39 I hope she is too. Shout out. We love Dr. Hicks. We love her. Um, she, sorry, um, the Awakening that you get outside of the education that you start with, the competition feels so high that you lose the interrelationships.
27:04 Um, and I think something that you've always embodied. The entire time I've known you is I think about this maturity continuum.
27:14 You start with dependent, independent, interdependent. And you can't jump. You can't skip steps in that maturity. So all of us are dependent when we're young, right?
27:28 You can't even feed ourselves. And as we go, we try to become more independent, meaning we're self-sufficient. We can get it.
27:36 And then at some point we realize, man, if I surround myself with enough good, independent people, and we can build trust together, we can now create something greater than the sum of our individual efforts.
27:54 And that's really hard to find, I think, until you kind of get in that rhythm with vulnerability, uh, with Paying attention to who's in your team, but also how you're showing up.
28:09 You know, you mentioned feedback being really hard. And I think it is really hard with someone who doesn't take feedback very well.
28:18 Um, I mean, we've all seen that. Like you started and like, I'm not even calling you out. I'm just saying here's a sentence that could be better.
28:27 One question, how dare you, right? You get, we've all met those folks. But I think you're right, if you can invite the feedback, not offer it, but invite it.
28:41 That'll be the key, because then people will see, oh, no, no, I, I really want to get better and I value your opinion.
28:49 Whatever I could do, is there anything I could be doing better or different? Let me know. And I think that's, that's a huge shout out and a great piece of advice, Michelle.
28:58 Thank you so much for sharing that. Of course.