Show Notes
"If there's something I can do and should do, then I have a responsibility to do it. That is what I signed up for when I became a nurse." - Melinda Yormick
Melinda became an OR nurse after watching her grandfather go through a heart surgery, a second surgery to remove a retained sponge, and a stroke that left him bedridden for a decade.
She spent 14 years in the OR across seven health systems, then moved into leadership as a surgical service manager.
Then a patient died after an elective procedure. The surgery went fine. When the airway tube came out, the patient's airway collapsed, and the team couldn't find the emergency airway cart.
The code team couldn't find the patient either. In a two-million-square-foot building, nobody knew where anything was.
That night she went home and searched for something that could prevent it from happening again.
Nothing on the market met healthcare's needs. She didn't quit the next morning.
She spent months talking to frontline nurses and C-suite leaders, and once the case held up, she jumped.
She built Clara, a spatial intelligence platform that shows hospital teams where people and equipment are in real time.
Her hardest moment came long before any of this.
At 19, she lost her dad suddenly and laid on her kitchen floor in Orchard Park, New York, thinking this wasn't supposed to happen.
Getting up from that floor is the hardest thing she's ever done.
"If it's not hard, it's easy. And if it's easy, it's boring."
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