What if patient safety, staff wellbeing, and hospital financial performance are not separate problems to balance, but one connected system?

In this episode of the Chief Healthcare Officer Podcast, Dr. Fatih Mehmet Gül sits down with Ken Segel, co-founder and former CEO of Value Capture, and Shana Padgett, Value Capture’s current CEO, to explore the philosophy and practice of Zero Harm in healthcare.

Together, they unpack how hospitals can move beyond safety campaigns and improvement projects to build an operating system where harm prevention, psychological safety, frontline problem-solving, staff engagement, cost discipline, and technology all work together.

Ken shares lessons from working alongside the late Paul O’Neill, whose leadership thinking helped bring Zero Harm from high-reliability industries into healthcare. Shana reflects on her own journey from frontline healthcare operations to improvement science, and why she first came to Value Capture partly to challenge the idea that Zero Harm was truly possible.

The conversation also explores why safety cannot be treated as a nursing initiative alone, why hospital leaders must leave their offices and observe real work, how mistakes should become learning rather than punishment, and how AI and digital tools must earn their place by solving real problems at the bedside.

In this episode, you’ll hear about:

• What Zero Harm really means in healthcare
• Why safety should be the way hospitals run the business, not an extra initiative
• How patient safety, staff joy, quality, flow, and cost are deeply connected
• Why punitive cultures prevent true improvement
• How psychological safety helps frontline teams speak the truth
• Why many Lean and improvement projects fail to sustain progress
• How hospital CEOs can better understand daily work by going to the frontline
• The role of technology, EHRs, and AI in harm-free care
• The leadership legacy of Paul O’Neill and the future of Value Capture

This is a conversation for healthcare executives, hospital CEOs, clinical leaders, quality and safety teams, and anyone interested in building safer, more humane, and more reliable healthcare systems.

Check out Dr. Fatih's Connected Care Book on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Care-Transformation-Human-Centred-Healthcare/dp/9699797118

Listen to the episode and let us know what you think using the contact form on our website: https://www.chiefhealthcareofficer.com.

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In this episode of the Chief Healthcare Officer Podcast, Dr. Fatih Mehmet Gül speaks with Dr. Nicholas Testa, Chief Clinical Officer at Sentact, emergency physician, healthcare executive, and educator at the University of Southern California.

The conversation begins with a difficult question: after decades of patient safety work, protocols, root cause analyses, high-reliability frameworks, and major investment in quality programs, why is preventable harm in hospitals still rising?

Dr. Testa argues that the answer is rarely just another protocol. Even the best checklist can fail when a clinician feels it is safer to stay silent. Real patient safety depends on trust, psychological safety, accountability, leadership behaviour, and the daily culture inside hospitals.

Drawing on his experience as an emergency physician, hospital CMO, regional clinical leader across 29 hospitals in California, and now Chief Clinical Officer at Sentact, Dr. Testa explains why healthy safety cultures often report more harm events, not fewer, because people feel safe enough to surface problems.

The episode explores how healthcare leaders can build trust, manage incident reporting without creating fear, balance psychological safety with accountability, use data more intelligently, and make rounding and safety huddles part of the operating rhythm of the hospital.

Topics discussed include:

• Why preventable harm remains a major challenge in hospitals
• Why “zero harm” can become dangerous if it discourages honest reporting
• The difference between safety and quality
• Why trust is the operating system of healthcare
• How leaders unintentionally erode trust under pressure
• Why psychological safety does not mean avoiding difficult conversations
• How to balance accountability and vulnerability as a clinical leader
• Why CMOs must question their data, not just review dashboards
• The role of patient safety organizations and shared learning across hospitals
• Why rounding is one of the most powerful leadership behaviours
• How daily safety huddles can change hospital culture
• What boards and senior leaders need to understand about preventable harm

If this conversation resonates with you, share it with one healthcare colleague who needs to hear it. Patient safety does not improve through quiet agreement. It improves through louder conversations in the right rooms.

Check out Dr. Fatih's Connected Care Book on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Care-Transformation-Human-Centred-Healthcare/dp/9699797118

Listen to the episode and let us know what you think using the contact form on our website: https://www.chiefhealthcareofficer.com.

Follow Dr Fatih Mehmet Gül on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drfameg/
Visit Dr Fatih's Website - https://www.fatihmehmetgul.com/

Subscribe to the CHO LinkedIn Newsletter - https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-chief-healthcare-officer-6939938177927241728/

In this episode of The Chief Healthcare Officer, Dr. Fatih Mehmet Gül speaks with Nancy Wright, VP of Commercial Services and Digital Platforms at GE HealthCare, about what it really takes to make healthcare technology work for people.

Nancy brings a unique operations-led perspective to commercial healthcare transformation, helping health systems think beyond equipment and technology procurement. Together, Dr. Fatih and Nancy explore why the future of healthcare is not simply about buying better technology, but about redesigning care around clinicians, patients, workflows, safety and long-term system resilience.

The conversation covers some of the most urgent questions facing healthcare leaders today: workforce shortages, digital transformation, cybersecurity, predictive maintenance, AI-enabled asset management, rural and ambulatory care, cultural safety, and the future role of hospitals.

A key theme runs throughout the discussion: technology must not become another layer of complexity. It should amplify empathy, extend human capacity and make care delivery smoother, safer and more sustainable.

Nancy also explains why healthcare leaders must stop treating digital transformation as a project and start seeing it as a cultural shift. Successful transformation, she argues, requires leaders to “lead from the centre,” create psychological safety, involve clinicians early, understand community needs, and avoid the costly trap of buying technology before defining the problem.

The episode also explores cybersecurity as a patient safety issue, not just an IT concern. Nancy shares why health systems must embed cybersecurity into every technology decision and treat system resilience as part of care quality.

The conversation closes with a powerful look ahead to the future of hospitals, digital twins, and the possibility that every patient may one day have a data-backed “digital carbon copy” that helps healthcare teams deliver more proactive, personalised care.

Key topics covered

Healthcare digital transformation
Human-centred technology
GE HealthCare advanced services
Workforce shortages in healthcare
Cybersecurity as a patient safety issue
Predictive maintenance and medical equipment
AI in biomedical engineering and asset management
Rural healthcare and remote patient monitoring
Ambulatory care and hospital capacity
Cultural safety in digital transformation
The future of hospitals
Digital twins in healthcare
Connected Care and healthcare leadership

Check out Dr. Fatih's Connected Care Book on Amazon:
https://www.amazon.com/Connected-Care-Transformation-Human-Centred-Healthcare/dp/9699797118

Listen to the episode and let us know what you think using the contact form on our website: https://www.chiefhealthcareofficer.com.

Follow Dr Fatih Mehmet Gül on LinkedIn - https://www.linkedin.com/in/drfameg/
Visit Dr Fatih's Website - https://www.fatihmehmetgul.com/

Subscribe to the CHO LinkedIn Newsletter - https://www.linkedin.com/newsletters/the-chief-healthcare-officer-6939938177927241728/