From Bedside to Boardroom: Kristi Henderson on Building Healthcare’s Future || EP.229

2026-01-06

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Kristi Henderson invented telehealth at the University of Mississippi Medical Center decades before anyone thought healthcare needed it. While her colleagues were optimizing traditional clinic workflows, Kristi was asking a different question: What if geography didn't dictate healthcare access? By the time the pandemic forced everyone else to figure out virtual care overnight, she'd already spent two decades perfecting it. What makes her approach distinctive isn't just her track record at Amazon, Ascension, and...

Kristi Henderson invented telehealth at the University of Mississippi Medical Center decades before anyone thought healthcare needed it.

While her colleagues were optimizing traditional clinic workflows, Kristi was asking a different question: What if geography didn't dictate healthcare access? By the time the pandemic forced everyone else to figure out virtual care overnight, she'd already spent two decades perfecting it. What makes her approach distinctive isn't just her track record at Amazon, Ascension, and Optum. It's that she worked every level of the healthcare system for 24 years before reaching the C-suite. She understands frontline friction because she lived it.

At Amazon, Kristi discovered a framework that changed everything: one-way doors versus two-way doors. Some decisions are irreversible and demand precision. Others are experiments where failure means pivoting fast. That distinction became her playbook for tackling problems most leaders won't touch. But her most counterintuitive move? When she became CEO of Confluent Health, her first hire wasn't a CFO or COO. It was a leader for internal communications. Because brilliant transformation plans fail without deliberate stakeholder engagement. Change happens at the speed of trust.

Now Kristi is betting on something that sounds almost naively optimistic: that AI will finally give clinicians their time back by eliminating friction, not replacing human connection. She uses AI daily as her "sidekick" and is building an organization where technology supercharges what only humans can do.

Key Takeaways:

Why Kristi kept raising her hand for jobs no one else wanted and how taking the hardest assignments became her competitive advantage
The Amazon framework that changed everything: one-way doors versus two-way doors, and how to know which type of decision you're making
What "change happens at the speed of trust" actually means in practice when you're transforming organizations
Kristi's "reverse innovation" approach: why bottoms-up transformation consistently outperforms top-down mandates
The counterintuitive first hire Kristi made as CEO, and why communication infrastructure matters more than most leaders realize
How to handle naysayers strategically instead of avoiding them or trying to convince them
Why Kristi believes the workforce crisis isn't permanent if leaders focus on the right problem
The specific ways Kristi uses AI daily as a CEO, and why she sees it as the key to bringing joy back to clinical practice

About the Guest

Kristi Henderson, DNP, is CEO of Confluent Health, a family of physical therapy and occupational therapy companies. She spent the first 24 years of her career as a practicing nurse practitioner before pioneering telehealth at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, long before the pandemic made it mainstream. Kristi has since led digital transformation at Ascension Health, built clinical operations for Amazon Care, and served as CEO of Optum Everycare. She's Board Chair of the American Telemedicine Association and affiliate faculty at Dell Medical School and the University of Washington School of Nursing. Her career has been defined by raising her hand for challenges others declined and building tech-enabled care models that improve outcomes while reducing clinician burden.

Chapters

00:00 - Introduction at Confluent Health 01:57 - From Bedside to Boardroom: The Leadership Journey 06:10 - Amazon Care Lessons: One-Way vs Two-Way Doors 11:07 - Change Happens at the Speed of Trust 14:11 - Overcoming Naysayers: The Early Days of Telehealth 19:11 - Bringing Joy Back to Medicine 22:56 - AI Hacks and Daily Innovation

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