The successful people who make it aren’t the ones with the most certifications. They’re the ones who had people they could ask the basic questions.

That’s what I want this space to be.

I’m opening up Substack Chat as a permanent community space for all Clinically Wired subscribers. Always open, where you can drop a question, share something you’ve learned, or tell us about the move you just made.

Some ways to use it:

• You’re reading a job posting and can’t figure out what “cross-functional stakeholder alignment” would mean in practice. Go ahead and ask.

• You just had a conversation with your manager about moving into IT and it went sideways. Or it went fabulously! Either way tell us what happened.

• You found a resource, a course, a conference, or a contact that helped you. Please share it.

• You’re in a hybrid clinical/IT role and figuring it out in real time. You’re the person someone else would love to hear from.

• You made the jump years ago and wish someone had told you what to expect. 👋 Tell us what you wanted to hear before.

• This is our Community. The whole point of Clinically Wired is that we don’t do this alone. I was empowered to build my career because people opened doors for me. Now I want to open them for you. Perhaps you can open them for each other.

Head to Chat and introduce yourself. Tell us where you are in the journey. Bedside and curious, mid-transition, or already on the other side. I’ll be in there too.

Stand on my shoulders. Then help someone else stand on yours.

— Colleen

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

The Zoom meeting itself also has the meeting video, summary and transcript. Available in Zoom if you attended.

Clinically Wired Office Hours Session 1 Ai Transcribed Notes 04 2026

102KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Clinically Wired Office Hours Session 1 Deck

464KB ∙ PDF file

Download

Download

Thank you to all that attended and those that sent regrets. I value your time and I hope you found it helpful.

We will have our next Session in 2-3 weeks. ‘Decoding the Job Posting’.

I’ll post info here and in the usual places, LI and Slack.

Stand on my Shoulders

I’m hosting my first
Clinically Wired Open Office Hours!
Session 1: From Care Delivery to System Design:
The Shift into Health IT
A live discussion with an open Q&A for clinicians exploring roles in health IT, product, and technology leadership.

Details:
April 2, 7:00 PM Eastern
Zoom session

Registration Link
Capped at 25 participants

AGENDA
• 10 min -- Welcome, short intros, housekeeping rules, who I am and why I'm doing this.
• 10 min -- My story: bedside nurse to SVP of Clinical Product and IT.
• 10 min -- What health IT actually means beyond informatics: the non traditional roles you may not know about about
• 5 min -- The mindset shift: from patient advocate to product owner (you're still advocating, just differently).
• 25 min -- Open Q&A and discussion.

Who should come:
• Any nurses, midlevels, therapists, clinicians curious about IT
• If you’re curious, but not sure where to start this is a good place to begin.

I was building computers before anyone called it a career.

It was the mid-1990s. I was working as an Electrophysiology Nurse at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, the teaching hospital for Brown University. The Electrophysiology or EP lab is a specialized procedure room for cardiac electrophysiology. Think OR, but instead of a surgeon, you have a cardiologist threading catheters through blood vessels into a beating heart, guided by technology. This sophisticated technology was largely managed by outside vendors.

The technology in that lab was not plug-and-play. We ran 3D electro cardiac mapping systems, that tracked catheter position inside the heart with millimeter precision. We managed multi-channel recording systems capturing intracardiac electrograms simultaneously from a dozen electrode sites. We operated fluoroscopy and imaging equipment, programmers for implantable devices, and hemodynamic monitoring systems. All running in concert, in real time, on a patient whose heart rhythm we were actively manipulating.

At home, I was building my own computers from parts. Not as a side project, but more of a desire. I needed to understand how things worked at the component level. When I brought that same curiosity into the EP lab, something shifted: I taught myself every piece of technology we used. The 3D Intracardiac mapping systems. The rhythm recording equipment. The e-stim catheter technology. Eventually I could troubleshoot and manage the technology without waiting for anyone to fly in.

When something went wrong with the technology in the middle of a case, you didn’t have time to call a vendor. You figured it out. That environment, where the technology is mission-critical, the stakes are the patient on the table, and failure is not an option, is where I learned to think like a technologist.

Then EHRs arrived. And I said yes before I knew what I was agreeing to.

Electronic health records were beginning to take hold across the country. Most clinicians had no framework for what was coming.

An opportunity opened at a critical access hospital where I worked as an ICU nurse. Would I be willing to lead an EHR implementation in New Hampshire? And no, we weren’t starting with the practice EHR, we’d be starting with a ‘Big Bang’, documentation and CPOE (computerized physician order entry). Everything everywhere, all at once.

I was a nurse. No formal IT credentials. No project management certification. No implementation experience. What I had was clinical instincts, a stubborn need to understand systems, and the ability to translate between the language of clinicians and the language of technology.

I said yes.

What followed was eight years at The Memorial Hospital at North Conway, NH — as a department of one in Clinical Informatics. I moved from the floor to operations in the IT department, reporting to the Director of IT. I led strategic planning, implementation, and optimization of their clinical information system and CPOE. Within one year, 90% of a team of 25 physicians were using CPOE. We achieved Meaningful Use attestation in 2011, the first year federal attestation was available.

That one “yes” defined the next twenty years of my career.

Share

The path is not a straight line. Here’s what it actually looked like.

Regional Clinical Informaticist for ten hospitals across Eastern Pennsylvania. Senior Clinical Informatics Consultant, serving as Program Director for the IT transformation of a new hospital tower at UConn Health.

Director of IS Clinical Systems at Albany Medical Center — 60 inpatient clinical systems, 20 analysts and managers, full vendor contracting and budgeting accountability. A $4M Varian ARIA implementation. A $2M bedside barcode lab system that reduced draw errors by 25% in six months.

Then CIO, CHIO, and ISSO at Alliance for Better Health. One of 25 Performing Provider Systems under New York State’s $6.4B DSRIP Medicaid redesign. Alliance served six Capital Region counties, driving value-based contracting and clinically integrated networks across hospitals, community-based organizations, and FQHCs. I also served on the Board of the Health Information Exchange of New York (HIXNY), supporting the data infrastructure behind the effort.

And now SVP of Clinical Product and Technology at a behavioral health startup where I own the full product lifecycle of four proprietary applications, plus others, that power care communication and outcomes across multi-state provider networks.

That means I’m accountable for the entire software development lifecycle. From product strategy and roadmap planning through requirements, development, QA, deployment, and post-launch optimization. I manage vendor relationships, negotiate the SOWs, own the IT budget, and run the help desk operations that keep clinicians working without interruption. I lead regulatory compliance across HIPAA, security posture, and audit readiness; not as a checkbox exercise, but as an operational discipline embedded in every product decision. I drive the clinical go-live strategy for new site rollouts, provider training programs, and system adoption across organizations that didn’t build this technology and need to trust it.

At a startup, there is no “that’s someone else’s department.” The strategic planning, the operational execution, and the clinical accountability all sit in the same chair. Mine.

This is not an informatics role. This is the engineering and product side of health IT — the work most clinicians don’t know exists and almost no one is teaching them how to reach.

None of this was planned. Yet every step was a decision to walk toward the harder thing.

The moment that told me everything about why this work matters.

I was sitting in a focus group. A room full of IT executives. My nameplate in front of me read:

Colleen Russell, MSN, NI-BC Chief Health Information Officer

A male CMIO across the table looked at my nameplate, looked at me, and asked:

“Isn’t that a role reserved for a physician?”

That assumption only exists if you believe healthcare IT leadership follows a medical pecking order.

“Well, sir. I don’t work for a hospital.”

My credentials were on the nameplate in front of him. My title was on the nameplate in front of him. I was sitting at the same table, invited to the same room, for the same reason.

And still, the first instinct was to question whether I belonged there.

This is not a rare experience. This is Tuesday in healthcare IT for women in technical leadership. And it is exactly why I am building what I am building. Because you deserve to walk into those rooms prepared, confident, and armed with a response that is calm, direct, and entirely unapologetic.

Why I’m building this now.

There is almost no structured pathway for clinicians who want to move into the engineering and product side of health IT — product management, software strategy, vendor leadership, technical IT operations, and executive accountability. Not informatics certification prep. This is about working inside the IT department. Understanding the engineering, the product development, the operations, and the cross-channel between clinical and technology across the entire organization.

I’m building Clinically Wired for the clinician who is already the go-to tech person on the unit and doesn’t know there’s a career waiting for them. For the clinical analyst who wants to move into product management but can’t find the on-ramp. For the woman in an IT leadership role who is doing the work and still being asked whether she belongs there.

I still had to figure out most of it on my own. You don’t have to.

If any part of this resonates, please subscribe. I’m building this for you.

I didn’t get here alone — but I had to climb without a map.

Stand on my shoulders. Then offer yours to the next woman up.

— Colleen Russell, MSN, NI-BC

SVP of Clinical Product and Technology | Founder, Clinically Wired | 30-Year Nurse | 20-Year HIT Executive

Subscribe now