Stacy McClenahan

My dad taught me that everything is connected. The land, the people, the systems we build, and the choices we make all depend on each other, and no relationship is one-way. That’s how I was raised to see the world, and it’s how I approach my work. When a problem comes up, I try to see the whole picture first: who it touches, what it affects down the line, and what it will cost to fix it properly. Problems rarely live in one place, so I don’t treat them that way. I look for the relationships that hold a system together and work to keep them healthy, because I’ve learned that systems that depend on one person to keep them running eventually fail. I’d rather build something that lasts, where everyone involved has a stake in it and can carry it forward without me.

A manager told me in my early twenties that I was a terrible people leader. I was an efficient individual contributor, but I didn’t let people fail. I just did the work myself. He said people learn by failing and being coached through it. That hit hard, and it changed how I lead. I had to learn where healthy independence ends and codependence begins, because an effective leader lets people struggle, then stays close enough to help them get back up.

Ask questions, even the ones you think are silly. Make eye contact and treat people as people. Doctors aren’t more important than anyone else in the room. Stay curious, don’t assume a title means someone knows better, and say so when something doesn’t feel right. Treat everyone, from the physician to the nurse, as a peer. We’re all in this together.

Clinical informatics faces a consistent challenge: the gap between clinical and technical teams. Clinicians who have spent years in surgery, cardiology, or orthopedics should not have to understand what engineering can build, and engineers should not have to understand the clinical work. The feedback that passes between them is often too vague to act on, and the two sides end up talking past each other. That gap is where I do my best work.

A related problem is knowing where data reconciliation stops being a data problem and becomes a privacy problem. Metadata is captured at the point of care by licensed clinicians, such as radiologic technologists and phlebotomists. Once that data moves into a warehouse, who is responsible for it? And if it needs correcting, should a licensed clinician be the one to correct it? I’ve written about these questions in my coursework, and I think they need answers before the data is trusted for anything else.

Curiosity and empathy matter most to me, in my work and in my life. I can teach almost any technical skill, but I can’t teach someone to be curious or to care about the person across the table. I try to ask good questions and understand the problem before I start proposing solutions. I put myself in other people’s shoes, even when that means understanding a frustrated physician, and I listen to how someone feels, not only to what they say. Without those, you can’t be an effective translator between people who speak different languages.