Healthcare Systems Architect Introduction

In this special episode of Dr. Doctor Podcast, host Jovanna Sloshenberg reflects on a life-changing milestone, graduating from Harvard Medical School with a Master of Science in Clinical Service Operations. Sharing insights from her academic journey and years of experience in healthcare innovation, Jovanna explores what it means to be a healthcare systems architect and why the biggest challenges in healthcare are often system challenges rather than medical ones.

From clinical research and patient recruitment to physician burnout, healthcare access, and emerging technologies, this episode examines how better system design can create more connected, efficient, and human-centered care. Jovanna discusses the importance of eliminating fragmentation, empowering frontline healthcare professionals, and building healthcare environments where patients and providers can thrive.

Join the conversation as we shift the focus from healthcare delivery to healthcare design and discover how the future of healthcare will be built one patient encounter, one connection, and one system at a time.

Jovanna Schlossenberg, MCSO

Harvard Medical School Alumni Association

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:09

Hello everyone. Welcome to another exciting episode of Dr. Doctor the Podcast. I'm your host, Giovanna Sloschenberg. And if there's a little pep in my voice, that is because I am proud to share that I am a recent Harvard Medical School alumni. This past week I successfully graduated Harvard Medical School with a master's of science in clinical service operations. It is still a humbling experience. I'm still catching up to everything. It was an absolute whirlwind. Harvard Medical School offers around 9 to 11 or so master's degrees. One of them is in clinical service operations. There's one in clinical research. There's one in biomedics. My particular one I um worked for was in clinical research operations. So graduated in cohort six, which means we are the sixth program to have graduated. So just really experienced a life-changing event with the people graduated with. It feels like my wedding day was the best way to describe graduation. I've never felt such elation like that. It was truly an amazing experience. Congratulations to all of the graduates. Excited to get to work. I mean, that's what this is all about. It's about getting to work and doing it right, getting patients the care they need, making sure that they have the highest level of integrity overseeing their most precious documents and the decisions that govern their health. So super excited to add to our industry in a positive way. This episode of Dr. Doctor is brought to you by Clin MatchGo, your clinical trial connector, connecting participants, physicians, and pharmaceutical partners to local clinical research trials. Please head over to www.clinmatchgo to find out more information. Wanted to talk to you about actually what postgraduation looks like. And as we learned in school, systems aren't fragmented. People are. So what that means is as a healthcare systems architect, it's my number one job to design a system that eliminates fragmentation from people's lives. I don't want you as a healthcare person to log into your system and begin your workday and immediately have an issue that can't allow you to operate at the top of your license. So being a healthcare systems architect, I work directly with the frontline workers, I work directly with the technology team, work directly with the medical team, such as the clinical medical officer, the chief information officer, I work with the study coordinator, I work with registered nurses, I work with physicians, I want to hear everybody's point of view, and I want to help make your day better. To help understand exactly what a healthcare systems architect is, think about a building. Before construction crews arrive, before the electricians pull the wire, before the plumbers install pipes, someone creates the blueprint, someone studies how all of these pieces, excuse me, someone studies how all of these pieces fit together. How will people move through this space? Where will the bottlenecks occur? How do we create efficiency without sacrificing quality? Healthcare needs that same type of thinking. It's not just nurses, it's not just hospitals, it's not just technology, it's not just research. It's an interconnected ecosystem of people, patients, providers, payers, regulators, researchers, and a community. Yet often the pieces operate independently. As a healthcare systems architect, I focus on designing the connections between them. We look at healthcare with a view of never losing sight of individual participants standing on the ground. These questions matter because every healthcare challenge eventually becomes a system challenge. Whether we're talking about patient access, physician burnout, clinical trial enrollment, health care disparity, staffing shortages, artificial intelligence, or rising health costs. The root cause often comes back to system design. My goal moving forward is to help build healthcare systems that are most connected, more efficient, more accessible, and ultimately more human, not just for health care, but for the patients who depend on these systems every day. So today on Doctor Doctor, I invite you to think about healthcare delivery and start thinking about healthcare design. It's the future of healthcare. We would like to build it with one patient encounter at a time. It will be built one system at a time. I really appreciate this platform to speak with everybody. It's really cool to connect with the healthcare community, with the patients, the physicians, the pharmaceutical companies all at one time. You have to think of podcasts as the form of radio. So, you know, radio meets reaches hundreds of thousands of people at one time getting that direct message, and this is what I'm trying to do. So I absolutely love you. You're the reason that I went to school. There's a term called put your mask on first, and that's what going to school was. I needed to protect all of these things I've learned along the way so that I could create a better system for you. So excited to get to work, excited to help, and I'm looking forward to the future of healthcare and being a part of it in a positive way.