What It Actually Looks Like to Move Beyond Traditional HR

Featuring Nakesha Lopez, Chief People & Culture Officer, Advocate Health

Recorded live at Advocate Health's The Pearl innovation quarter in Charlotte, North Carolina.

Advocate Health is one of the three largest nonprofit health systems in the country — 175,000 teammates across six states. Nakesha Lopez leads the people and culture function for all of it. She started in HR because someone mentioned a job posting at Memorial Sloan Kettering. She didn't know what HR was. Twenty-five years later, she's redefining what it can be.

📍 HR's Seat at the Table Isn't Given — It's Earned Through Business Fluency Nakesha's definition of non-traditional HR starts here: the people and culture strategy cannot be separate from the organizational strategy. HR leaders must speak CFO, speak operations, speak clinical — and translate across all of it. The interpreter who removes barriers and co-creates with operational leaders before rolling anything out. Her biggest early-career mistake taught her that lesson permanently.

🤖 People-Led, AI-Enabled — Not the Other Way Around Advocate Health's AI strategy is co-led by Nakesha and the Chief AI Officer. The frame is workforce transformation, not AI transformation — because the goal is improved teammate experience, not technology deployment for its own sake. Advocate is rolling out AI literacy organization-wide: helping 175,000 teammates assess where they are in their AI maturity and build from there. If your organization is not building AI literacy now, the new grad you hire in 2027 will notice.

⚡ Work Forward: Advocate's Workforce Transformation Strategy Work Forward is Advocate's structured approach to redesigning work alongside the teammates who do it — cross-functional teams identifying workflows to improve, enabled by AI, with clear accountability for what happens to the work that goes away and the new skills required to replace it. It is not a project. It is a culture being built over multiple years.

🔎 The Takeaway for Every Healthcare HR Leader Embrace the future — but do it together. Your peers, your vendors, your frontline teammates are your co-designers. The best outcomes come from bringing different minds into the same room and letting the debate happen.

Connect with Nakesha: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nakesha-lopez-b817821

Enjoying the show? Subscribe to The ASHHRA Podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

This episode is brought to you by AP3 — the ASHHRA Preferred Partner Program.

Healthcare HR leaders are navigating rising costs, workforce shortages, and an overwhelming vendor landscape. AP3 cuts through the noise.

Managed in collaboration with Lockton and backed by ASHHRA, AP3 is a governed ecosystem of vetted, healthcare-aligned solution providers across talent acquisition, benefits administration, workforce compliance, financial wellness, and employee engagement. Every partner is rigorously vetted. Every relationship is governed. Every solution is built for healthcare.

No directories. No bidding wars. Just trusted partners proven to perform.

Visit AP3.info to learn more and get connected with a partner.

Support the show

Pay Transparency Hits July 1, Two-Thirds of HR Leaders Don't Know What AI Can Do & 84% of Healthcare Workers Feel Taken for Granted

June 22nd, 2026. Luke Carignan is flying solo — Bo and Jeremy are out — and he is not slowing down. Three stories: compliance, technology, and the most human challenge in healthcare right now.

⚖️ Pay Transparency Laws Hit Virginia and Maine July 1
Every job posting in Virginia and Maine must include an actual salary range beginning July 1st. No "competitive compensation." No DOE. Virginia's law has no employer size threshold — a 20-person clinic and a 50,000-employee health system face the same requirement. A salary history ban is also in effect. 16 states now have pay transparency laws. Penalties start at $1,000 per violation, with a 15-day correction window that protects you from a lawsuit on that specific posting.
Action: Audit your postings today. Then stop treating this as compliance and start treating it as competitive advantage. Candidates are three times more likely to apply when a salary range is included. In a market with 1.3 million open healthcare jobs, that is not a small number.

🤖 SHRM 2026: The AI Gap Is Awareness, Not Budget
SHRM surveyed 1,700+ HR professionals and found the number one barrier to AI adoption is not cost or security — it is a lack of awareness. 67% of HR leaders don't fully understand what AI can do in hiring. Meanwhile, 92% of CHROs expect greater AI integration in 2026. And 57% of HR professionals in states with AI hiring laws don't know those laws exist. 19 of the most populous states have enacted them.
Action: Schedule a real AI literacy session for your HR team — not a vendor demo. Find out what AI hiring laws apply in your state. If your legal team doesn't know, that is also useful information.

🧠 84% of Healthcare Workers Feel Taken for Granted
ProLink's 2026 Pulse of Travel Healthcare and a Harris Poll align on the same finding: burnout (29%), declining morale (21%), and turnover (20%) are the top three workforce threats — all people problems. 80% say well-being programs don't work. Workers are short-staffed 43% of the time. No mindfulness app fixes that.
Action: Stop solving a retention problem with a benefits solution. Flexibility — shift autonomy, compressed schedules, hybrid models for admin roles — is what the data points to. Go ask someone on your team today how they are actually doing. Really ask.

Enjoying the show? Subscribe to The ASHHRA Podcast on your favorite podcast platform so you never miss an episode.

This episode is brought to you by AP3 — the ASHHRA Preferred Partner Program.

Healthcare HR leaders are navigating rising costs, workforce shortages, and an overwhelming vendor landscape. AP3 cuts through the noise.

Managed in collaboration with Lockton and backed by ASHHRA, AP3 is a governed ecosystem of vetted, healthcare-aligned solution providers across talent acquisition, benefits administration, workforce compliance, financial wellness, and employee engagement. Every partner is rigorously vetted. Every relationship is governed. Every solution is built for healthcare.

No directories. No bidding wars. Just trusted partners proven to perform.

Visit AP3.info to learn more and get connected with a partner.

Support the show