Suzanne Fuller Blamey

I work in healthcare and have a lot of senior clinical leadership experience in organizations in Toronto and Vancouver. My experience is focused on digital transformations of healthcare organizations. I’m currently part of a Clinical Leadership Team that leads the design of processes, physical structures, and digital transformation for the Outpatient Services in the new St Paul’s Hospital in Vancouver. When the new hospital opens in 2026/2027, it will be the most digitally enhanced health organization in B.C. 

I help lead leaders and teams to redesign their current processes to build digital applications to enhance their processes. I get a lot of satisfaction from supporting organizations with change management. In particular, I enjoy helping frontline staff make the leap to incorporate digital applications into their daily processes. 

The main value of the Digital Transformation Leadership Program was that I could apply my learnings to my work seamlessly, which made it easy to see the value of this program. It was helpful for me to identify our key customers in Outpatient Services and Providence Health, how we do our business currently, what our customers need, and what potential digital solutions could meet the needs of our patients, staff, and organization.

Creating ideation and outcome statements for how our patients will be better served with the addition of digital applications was a helpful way of documenting our future plans, from the patient’s perspective. I use Patient Journey Mapping all of the time, but adding the digital application solutions to the bottom of the map was new to me. In creating the Outpatient Services Clinical and Digital Transformation Roadmap, I utilized one of the evidence-based tools recommended in the course. The Benefits Dependency Network tool helped to articulate which steps in the Roadmap had to occur prior to digital application implementation as well.

There were a couple of weeks at the end to create a clinical and digital transformation roadmap. This pushed all of us to take the time to utilize the tools to incorporate into the Outpatient Services work that I was already doing. I made sure to gain a full understanding of the readings and others’ perspectives before I submitted my posts. This enriched the learning. 

The DTL Program‘s first few lectures grounded me. They got us thinking through all the different parts of transforming an organization through digitalization. These lectures also stripped down the jargon around the digitalization process. The first six lectures were particularly engaging and had high learner participation in the discussions. 

I also really enjoyed reviewing and understanding the digital transformation best practices in all industries across the world. For example, it was really helpful to understand that in many companies, somebody in operations leads digital transformation projects instead of an IT director. 

I have three pieces of advice: 

1. What you put into the Digital Transformation Leadership Program is what you get out of the course, so take your time and extract as many nuggets as you can. 

2. When you come into the program, pick a topic or project from your work and stick with it! I had to do the work anyway, so using the Outpatient Services project to get it done worked wonderfully. 

3. The program offers a fantastic opportunity for cross-industry learning from members of your cohort. I’m in healthcare and learned a lot from my group members in the automotive industry and airport operations. In fact, I recently invited my classmate from the Vancouver Airport Authority to share the presentation he made at the Closing Synch Session with my team.

My advice is to use the time to build these relationships.