Keeping Patients Safe With Smarter Systems

Melinda Yormick (MBA 2023) was working as an operating room nurse when she first applied to the Executive MBA program at the University of Washington Foster School of Business. She brought strong clinical experience, but the admissions team wanted to see more leadership tenure or a more senior title. “They said I either needed more time in leadership or a higher title,” she says. “So I went out and got both.”

Yormick, who is a registered nurse, took a new role managing Surgical Services and the Interventional Spine Center at a prominent Seattle hospital.

In that position, she encountered the operational failure that would change her career trajectory. It was a tragic loss, where delays and confusion prevented the right team from reaching a patient in time. It wasn’t an isolated incident. As Yormick looked more deeply into the problem, she found that even the most respected hospitals experience similar breakdowns.

“There were no bad actors. Everyone was doing their best,” she says. “But our systems weren’t designed for real-time visibility. I felt like it was part of my responsibility as a nurse to do something, to ensure that our patients are in safe hands and we’re keeping our promises to them.”

That experience sparked the idea for founding CLARA, a healthcare operations technology company that uses real-time location and time-based data to improve how hospitals coordinate care. “We get the right people and equipment to patients when they need it most,” Yormick says. “That can mean helping a nurse locate an emergency airway cart, making sure a patient isn’t left waiting in an unfamiliar wing, or ensuring surgical equipment is in the right place at the right time.”

She founded CLARA and soon after, reapplied to the Executive MBA program. This time, she was accepted. “I knew I wanted to build something with CLARA,” she says. “But I didn’t want to go in blind.”

Building a business and a team

By the time Melinda Yormick walked into her first Executive MBA class at Foster, CLARA was already in motion. She approached the program with clear intention, filtering everything she learned through the lens of her startup. “Every course, every conversation, I was thinking about this company,” she says.

She also saw the program as an opportunity to build more than knowledge; she was building a leadership team. Today, four of CLARA’s six team members are Foster Executive MBA alums, including COO Sireesha Panchagnula, who was valedictorian of their cohort.

“Every time I worked with people during the program, I was thinking: Would I want to work with this person long-term? What kind of value could they bring to CLARA?” Yormick says. “Foster gave me access to people with serious expertise and shared values.”

Smarter systems for safer hospitals

CLARA is currently running a pilot at the University of Washington Medical Center, using real-time data to study how clinical spaces function and how hospital workflows can be improved. The system uses a network of sensors and tags to track equipment and personnel, generating a rich stream of operational data. Over time, this data can be used to identify inefficiencies, predict needs, and even automate routine communications that currently slow things down.

“We’re building the operational story of the hospital,” Yormick says. “With that, you can improve patient safety, reduce cost, and even make life better for clinicians because it removes some of the friction that leads to burnout.”

Yormick credits her Foster coursework, especially in operations management and statistics, with helping her see the business value of these insights. “That’s the heart of CLARA: taking clinical intuition and matching it with data,” she says. “The program helped me translate that intuition into a scalable strategy.”

What really matters

One of the biggest lessons she took from the Executive MBA wasn’t academic. It was about the power of people. “Your network is the most valuable thing life has to offer,” she says. “We don’t get far alone. And when I think about how the CLARA team came together, Foster made that possible.”

She encourages current and future students to go into the program with a strategy, whether or not they plan to change jobs or careers. “If your strategy is just to learn and connect, that’s still a great strategy,” she says. “But be intentional. Decide what you want to take away and then make it happen.”

The ROI of a mission

As CLARA prepares to raise its first formal investment round, Yormick is spending time in the San Francisco Bay Area, building connections with potential strategic investors. But her foundation remains rooted in the Pacific Northwest, where she built a career in care and a company in the classroom.

“The ROI of the Foster Executive MBA, for me, is not just what I learned,” she says. “It’s the people. It’s the confidence to lead. And it’s the ability to take an idea that matters—and turn it into something real.”

Learn more about the Executive MBA program here.