Carolyn Wilson

My passion is all about improving outcomes. Being Midwest born and bred, expectations were high from a young age to work hard, excel at anything you spend time on, and continually make things better. The drive to improve still burns strong 30 plus years into my professional career as well as my personal life.

I’ve had the opportunity to work with some of the brightest and most creative healthcare professionals, providers, and physicians as well as trainees who have fueled my need to stay current to answer all their insightful questions and have kept me learning every day. What better way to make a difference in people’s lives than a start in nursing; what a great opportunity to help individual patients and their families improve their clinical health and often participate in clinical research with my strong academic background. While I loved being part of the direct patient care team, I chose advancing leadership positions to continually broaden my sphere of influence to have more impact. Choosing positions in healthcare operations for many years fed my curiosity and allowed me to have a hand in so many areas like people (recruitment, retention, leading), finance (create and achieve the budget), operations (e.g., pharmacy, laboratory, imaging, rehab services, food services, environmental services and so much more) and real estate, design and construction. I started my leadership journey at the National Institutes of Health, moved to Chicago for many years working in the Rush System, then as COO at the University of Chicago Health and Associate Dean of the University of Chicago Physician Group before moving to Minneapolis as the Fairview Health System (a 4B system) COO and President of the University of MN Medical Center. A desire to be closer to family and at the “front end” of a health system merger, I became COO of the Beaumont Health System (a 4.5B system). Throughout these exciting roles and positions, I met amazing people, created a strong network, and gained experience in so many domains. I honed my skills in organizational planning and strategy as well as ensuring the plan and strategy are executed and implemented in measurable and sustainable ways to ensure long-term impact. People often ask me about the differing roles and projects I’ve led and been a part of and how it all makes sense; the answer is clear to me – it’s all about improving health outcomes!

While at Beaumont Health, I ran a competitive RFP process looking for a developer partner to collaboratively work with us to build two large comprehensive ambulatory campuses. It isn’t often that a partner exceeds your expectations yet that is what NexCore, the chosen partner for Beaumont, did. For the last couple of years, I’ve had the privilege of joining the NexCore team to work collaboratively with health systems, physician groups, and others to understand their vision for building (e.g., cancer center, MOB, ASC) and bring my experience to add value in refining their plan and strategy, developing measurable criteria to ensure we wrap a real estate solution around the agreed upon strategy that is financeable, improves the lives of patients, their families, and the healthcare team and reduces cost. I am particularly interested in ambulatory care and getting it closer to the homes of people and organized in a friendly and easily navigated manner so that more people engage with healthcare in prevention and earlier intervention of disease. I bring a unique perspective to the NexCore team and the “clients” in that I understand the nuances of healthcare in different markets, the challenges including financial and recruitment/ retention, but also what the customer needs to make a project viable and to get approval. I bring passion and energy on the front-end of projects to ensure the vision is achieved.