Stacie Miller
Stacie Miller is a seasoned nurse executive, healthcare consultant, and leadership coach with more than 35 years of experience in nursing and over a decade serving as a Chief Nursing Officer. Currently overseeing all nursing care for a nearly 400-bed hospital, she plays a critical role in shaping clinical strategy, guiding nursing operations, and ensuring that patient care remains grounded in compassion. Stacie is a steadfast advocate for preserving nursing’s voice in healthcare decision-making, working to ensure that care delivery is not overshadowed by financial pressures but instead centered on dignity, empathy, and patient outcomes.
She began her career as an emergency room nurse in major trauma centers, where she gained firsthand experience in high-stakes, emotionally intense environments. Witnessing life-and-death moments on a regular basis, she developed a profound perspective on care—recognizing that even in loss, compassion can bring meaning and peace. After years at the bedside, she transitioned into leadership, where she has spent the past 15 years mentoring teams, developing future leaders, and driving improvements in clinical operations. Her leadership style reflects both resilience and humanity, shaped by the mentors who invested in her and her own commitment to paying that forward.
Inspired early on by her father, a pioneering male nurse and the first of his kind to graduate from their alma mater in New Mexico, Stacie’s career has always been rooted in purpose and legacy. Today, she is deeply passionate about advancing the role of nurses at every level of healthcare, particularly as the industry evolves with emerging technologies like artificial intelligence. She believes strongly in mentorship, coaching, and leadership development, and continues to champion opportunities for nurses to influence policy, innovation, and patient care at the highest levels.
• Nursing degree from university in New Mexico
• Just One Mic (Bay Area)
• August Heart (Texas)
What do you attribute your success to?
I consider myself to be gritty, probably because I didn't have a great childhood. But I got super lucky and married an amazing man who served in the Air Force for 28 years, and watching him in that capacity was really inspiring for me. There were days where I would drive home from work and think, do I really live in this house, and is this really my life? Because based on some really poor decisions others made on my behalf and a few that I made for myself, I shouldn't have ended up where I did. But I think it gives you perspective on gratefulness. Working as an ER nurse in big trauma centers, seeing two to three people die a week, it gives you a whole different perspective on life. I became a nurse because I want to have a positive impact on humanity, even at their worst times. I believe death can be beautiful and can be an incredible memory for those that survive. If I can make someone's worst moment beautiful and something they can treasure, that's super meaningful to me. I've always believed that no matter how brief your encounter is with somebody, you should walk away and they should feel like you poured into them. Everybody's either a pitcher or a dipper - you either dip in and take away from people or you pour into them. I find that your cup is overflowing when you pour into others. I've been really lucky that I've had some great mentors and worked for some great companies that invested deeply in me, believed in me, and encouraged me. I now feel like I have a huge responsibility to pay it forward through leadership development, mentorship, and coaching.
What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I think nursing is at a very interesting place right now with a lot of technology happening, specifically around AI. There's a lot of talk that AI is going to replace nurses, but first of all, in order to be a nurse, the law requires that you go to an accredited nursing school, so AI can't be a nurse. Out of fear, a lot of nurses, specifically in unionized states, have responded by pushing back against AI, worried it's going to replace our jobs. But if I was growing up or going into the profession now, I would lean into that space. Learn everything you can about AI, because it has huge potential to remove a lot of administrative burden that nurses are doing today that nurses should have never been doing. The nurse is the last person between everyone else and the patient, so anything else that doesn't get done, the nurse has to do. AI has the ability to remove a lot of administrative burden around documentation and helping with admission and discharge criteria, ensuring we have great discharge plans so patients don't return to the hospital. I don't know that they're teaching a lot of AI in schools yet, so I would say really lean into that space, learn what you can about it. You're probably going to have to do it on your own right now. But I think it will serve you so that you're invited to the table of these big AI corporations, because they don't have nurses on their boards. These decisions are being made by doctors and business people and technology people, but very few are inviting nursing to the table, and nursing must have a seat at the table. We have to advocate for our profession, so lean into that space, really embrace it, and figure out how to leverage it. Don't be afraid of it.
What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
By 2030, we'll actually be like 300 million nurses short. But I think we have to be sure that nursing has a seat at the table for some of these decisions. What insurance company employs nurses to help them make decisions about reimbursement? They don't. This is where I think nursing needs to step forward and say, no, you can't make these decisions without us. We need caregivers at the bedside, but I think equally, we've got to have nurses like myself who understand hospitals and the business of healthcare, and how to keep nursing right smack in the middle of it, versus letting it drift to the periphery and let someone else make those decisions on our behalf. We can't let that happen, because nobody knows our profession more than we do, and we have bylaws that don't allow business people to make decisions for nurses. Our job is to advocate for the patient. Really leaning into that space is going to be really important in the next - normally I would say 5 to 10 years, but really, it's probably the next 1 to 3 years.