I’m a Cardiac Critical Care Nurse Who Became an SVP of Clinical Product and Technology

Here’s What Nobody Told Me

It started with a computer I built in my living room while working in the EP lab at Rhode Island Hospital. Thirty years later, I’m the SVP of Clinical Product and Technology at a healthcare startup, accountable for four proprietary applications +, serving networks of behavioral health organizations across multiple states. Here’s the unfiltered version of how that happened, and why I’m finally telling it.

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.

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