Our CEO, Kristi Henderson, was recently featured on the Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw podcast in an episode titled “From Bedside to Boardroom: Kristi Henderson on Building Healthcare’s Future.” In the conversation, Kristi reflects on a career spent leading transformation across academic medical centers, Fortune 5 companies, big tech, and national health systems, and why real change always comes back to the same fundamentals.
Despite operating in vastly different environments with unique organizational structures and power dynamics, Kristi has found that success hinges on three non-negotiables. According to Kristi, transformation doesn’t stall because leaders fail to adapt their style or navigate politics. It stalls when these fundamentals are missing. Trust is earned through relationships. Data must be credible enough to drive decisions. Execution must be reliable enough to build momentum. Miss any one, and even the most brilliant strategy won’t move the organization forward.
Kristi’s perspective is shaped by lived experience. She spent the first 24 years of her career as a practicing nurse practitioner, working every level of the healthcare system before stepping into the C-suite. That frontline experience gave her an unfiltered understanding of friction: what slows clinicians down, what burns them out, and what truly helps patients.
Long before virtual care became a necessity, Kristi pioneered telehealth at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, asking a question few others were considering at the time: “What if geography didn’t dictate access to care?” By the time the pandemic forced health systems to adopt virtual care overnight, Kristi had already spent decades refining it.
Later, at Amazon, she encountered a framework that reshaped how she approaches leadership and decision-making: one-way doors versus two-way doors. Some decisions are irreversible and require extreme care. Others are experiments—opportunities to learn, iterate, and pivot quickly. This distinction became central to how she tackles complex problems and drives innovation.
Today, Kristi is optimistic about the role technology can play in restoring joy to healthcare. She uses AI daily as her “sidekick,” not to replace human connection, but to eliminate friction and give clinicians their time back, allowing them to focus on what only humans can do.
Key Takeaways from the Episode
- Why Kristi consistently raised her hand for the hardest jobs—and how those challenges became her competitive advantage
- The Amazon “one-way door vs. two-way door” framework and how to apply it to leadership decisions
- What “change happens at the speed of trust” looks like in practice
- Why bottom-up, reverse innovation outperforms top-down mandates
- The importance of communication infrastructure in large-scale transformation
- How Kristi approaches naysayers strategically
- Why the workforce crisis isn’t permanent if leaders focus on the right problems
- How AI can reduce clinician burden and bring meaning back to care
Kristi’s conversation on Inspiring Women with Laurie McGraw offers a powerful reminder: while tools, technologies, and organizations change, the fundamentals of leadership and healthcare transformation remain the same.