Susan Goodson Connects Tech to Purpose at Lurie Children’s Hospital

Susan Goodson loves a good mantra. They help keep her centered on the real goal, the real issue at hand. The mantra that the chief digital information officer at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago keeps closest to her is “Do the right thing.”

“When you’re making decisions or leading a team, what’s the right thing to do for our patients, for our families, and for our organization?” Goodson asks. “This mantra is one shared by our entire technology leadership team. That’s something I found very quickly upon coming to Lurie.”

In coming to the hospital in 2024 (she was promoted to her current role in January 2025), Goodson saw a strong organization that seemed well-prepared for a digital leap ahead. She has seized that opportunity to implement an ambitious yet pragmatic vision aimed at using technology to give clinicians time back, families easier access to care, and children a better chance at healthy futures.

Goodson says she inherited a strong technology organization with a lot of moving parts already in motion. Where she was able to help came in the shape of a wider enterprise strategy that connected clinical care, operations, research, and patient experience. The anchor to that vision was a mission and vision crafted by her senior technology leaders. It serves as a guiding principle that is referenced at the start of every leadership meeting.

It works the same way a mantra does, to remind everyone involved why the team is doing what they do and how they’re doing it. They’re there to support patients, families, and frontline teams with technology that actually works for them.

If fall 2025 is any indicator, Goodson’s tenure at Lurie Children’s will be truly transformative. The brief period of browning and falling leaves included at least three major initiatives, starting with the opening of a new facility in Schaumburg that extends pediatric specialty care closer to where families live.

Then there was the implementation of a new imaging platform, Visage, with embedded AI capabilities and a cloud-based architecture that dramatically accelerates image handling and supports high-volume clinical care and research.

And the organization also completed its first phase of an “Epic Refuel” project, moving its long-standing EHR implementation more in line with foundational leaps made in the technology since its forward-looking first adoption in 2002. Instead of piecemeal patches, it’s the first phase of a truly transformational alignment.

Lurie Children’s had strong telemedicine programs even before the pandemic. Goodson’s focus has been on deeper integration, like virtual nursing and intelligent tools that make remote care more engaging.

A prime example is the hospital’s rollout of ambient AI scribe technology using Abridge, a tool that securely scribes to visits and drafts clinical documentation so that physicians can maintain eye contact instead of staring at a keyboard. Early adopters are seeing about a 20 percent reduction in documentation time, giving them back minutes that can be redirected toward conversation, education, and reassurance, precious commodities in pediatric encounters.

Goodson is quite clear about both the promise and limits of ambient listening.

“It’s just ‘ears,’ not ‘eyes,’” the executive says of the mantra that the team came up with and uses frequently. “A really important objecting in deploying this technology is to make our providers day easier. It’s about giving them a tool that helps them do their jobs more effectively. There’s such a credible cognitive load that they have to carry. Whatever we can do to support them, we want to be there.”

Goodson’s leadership style is deliberately transparent and collaborative. One of the things she did early was to bring senior technology leaders into a shared room to tackle problems as a group.

Monthly extended meetings are dedicated to solving real enterprise problems together, this has improved cross team communication and collaboration and the entire technology division can feel that the senior leaders are working together. “This extended meeting is just my leadership team,” Goodson says, “but I think it has solidified them as a team.”

The leader is also aware that working in a hospital technology division can, over time, feel distant from the patient bedside and the front lines. To bridge that gap, she brings the clinical environment directly to her team through regular Gemba Walks—a Japanese word that means “Go to where the work is”—and see the work they’re supporting in person to reinforce what’s truly at stake in their work.

In one session, she and the medical director of the laboratory conducted a live video tour of the lab using her cell phone and a selfie stick: technicians processing specimens, Epic Beaker status boards in action, lab lines dependent on the network and wireless infrastructure her teams maintain.

“A really important objecting in deploying this technology is to make our providers day easier. It’s about giving them a tool that helps them do their jobs more effectively.”

Susan Goodson

Another tour showcased the electrophysiology and cardiac surgery area, where anesthesia machines, imaging, and monitoring systems depend on low-latency connectivity to keep kids safe during highly complex procedures.

“It reminds our team that their work is incredibly important,” Goodson explains. “I want them to know that their work is both appreciated and essential to Lurie Children’s mission.”

She says she’s so happy to be back supporting pediatric care, her last role in the space was at Children’s Hospital Colorado from 2003 to 2012. Just a year-and-change in, Goodson and her team are helping future-proof an organization looking out for the most vulnerable of patients.

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