In this episode of the Chief Healthcare Officer Podcast, Dr. Fatih Mehmet GUL sits down with Dr. Haywood Brown, one of the most influential voices in maternal and women’s health, for a wide-ranging conversation on leadership, maternal mortality, health equity, postpartum care, prenatal innovation, and the future of women’s health.

A central theme of the conversation is the persistent challenge of maternal health equity. Dr. Brown explains why access to first-trimester care remains critical, why many women still enter pregnancy care too late, and how fragmented care between pregnancy, delivery, and postpartum continues to place mothers at risk.

The discussion also explores Dr. Brown’s work around the “fourth trimester” and his belief that postpartum care should be viewed not as the end of pregnancy, but as the beginning of a woman’s long-term health journey. Pregnancy complications such as preeclampsia, obesity, diabetes, growth restriction, and premature birth can signal an increased risk of cardiovascular disease later in life, making the postpartum period an important opportunity for prevention and long-term health management.

Beyond clinical medicine, Dr. Brown shares lessons from decades of leadership. He discusses leading through resistance, building trust, mentoring physicians, balancing education with productivity, and the importance of listening to people at every level of an organization. His philosophy is simple: leadership means learning continuously, listening carefully, giving people the opportunity to test their ideas, and leading by example.

Key Takeaways

• Maternal health equity remains heavily influenced by access to care. A significant number of women still do not receive first-trimester care, making early identification of pregnancy risks more difficult.
• Postpartum care should not be treated as a single six-week follow-up appointment. Early contact, structured discharge planning, and continued care throughout the first year can help identify hypertension, depression, breastfeeding challenges, infection, and other complications before they become more serious.
• Pregnancy can reveal important information about a woman’s future cardiovascular health. Preeclampsia, diabetes, obesity, growth restriction, and premature birth can all provide an early warning of long-term health risks.
• As more women become pregnant later in life, cardiovascular risk is becoming increasingly important in maternity care, particularly for patients with additional factors such as obesity or fertility treatment.
• Prenatal diagnostics and telehealth can help extend specialist expertise into underserved communities, but they should complement rather than replace maternal-fetal medicine specialists.
• Improving access does not always require highly specialized interventions. Giving general OB-GYNs, family physicians, nurse practitioners, and midwives better knowledge and diagnostic tools can significantly broaden access to prenatal screening.
• Leadership is not defined by title alone. Dr. Brown emphasizes listening, mentorship, honest feedback, continuous learning, and showing teams through actions that no responsibility is beneath the leader.
• Some of the most valuable leadership lessons can come from people outside senior clinical or executive roles. Dr. Brown describes learning from students, residents, faculty, nursing assistants, and commercial teams throughout his career.

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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Healthcare AI promises earlier interventions, better outcomes and more efficient hospitals—but why do so many implementations fail to gain clinicians’ trust?

In this episode, Dr. Fatih Mehmet Gül speaks with Dr. Suchi Saria, founder and CEO of Bayesian Health and a professor at Johns Hopkins University, about moving healthcare AI beyond impressive demonstrations and into everyday clinical practice.

Dr. Saria shares the personal loss that inspired her work, explains how AI can identify patient deterioration hours earlier, and discusses Bayesian Health’s collaboration with Mayo Clinic to improve access to proactive palliative care. She also reveals how the right implementation strategy helped increase clinician adoption from as little as 1% to more than 85%.

The conversation explores what it takes to build AI that clinicians genuinely trust, how better care can strengthen hospitals financially, and what healthcare leaders should do before making their first major AI investment.

Key takeaways

• Healthcare AI creates meaningful value when it helps clinicians intervene proactively instead of responding after a patient’s condition has deteriorated.
  In sepsis cases, Bayesian Health’s technology identified at-risk patients a median of 5.7 hours earlier.
• AI should support clinical judgment rather than attempt to replace it.
  The most effective systems explain why a patient has been flagged and make the appropriate next steps easier for clinicians.
• Alert fatigue is often a design and implementation failure rather than evidence that clinicians resist technology.
  AI must deliver relevant information within existing workflows without adding more noise or administrative burden.
• Clinician trust cannot be created through accuracy alone.
  Transparency, adaptability, peer validation, clinical evidence and practical support all influence whether clinicians adopt a new system.
• Mayo Clinic and Bayesian Health used AI to identify patients who could benefit from proactive palliative care.
  The initiative achieved reductions of approximately 25% to 28% in readmissions and nearly five days in hospital length of stay.
• Successful AI implementation depends as much on human-machine teamwork as it does on technical performance.
  Bayesian Health increased adoption from approximately 1% in previous hospital initiatives to more than 85% within six months.
• Improving care quality can also improve a hospital’s financial sustainability.
  Preventing complications, avoidable ICU transfers and unnecessary readmissions benefits patients while reducing the cost of care.
• Hospitals should not treat AI as a collection of disconnected products or rely on one technology provider to solve every problem.
  They need a focused strategy supported by partners who understand clinical data, workflows, implementation and outcome measurement.
• The best starting point for a hospital is its own performance data.
  Leaders should identify the clearest opportunities, establish a realistic roadmap and use an achievable first project to build confidence.
• Healthcare AI should ultimately make the right clinical action easier to take.
  Used thoughtfully, it can reduce low-value work, ease clinician burnout and help restore the human purpose at the heart of medicine.

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/

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.

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/