WakeMed Health & Hospitals | Case Study
Healthcare | Growth Architect | Raleigh, NC | 2015–2017
WakeMed is a major not-for-profit health system serving the Raleigh-Durham, NC region. Healthcare technology operates in a different risk environment than most industries. When systems fail in a restaurant chain, the consequence is operational. When systems fail in a hospital, the consequence can be clinical. That difference shapes every architectural decision, every line of code, and every conversation about what acceptable performance actually means.
The engagement began with an idea and a partnership: a pediatric surgeon with clinical insight and a health system with the operational scale to pilot it. The technology company didn't exist yet. Shad came in as CIO to build it, from concept to a working, HIPAA-compliant platform ready for live deployment. The problem being solved was deceptively simple to describe and genuinely dangerous in practice: when a hospital needs to reach the on-call physician, how long does it take? If the primary physician is unavailable, the answer could be up to four hours. In a clinical environment, four hours is not a delay. It is a risk to patient outcomes.
The platform that went to pilot changed that. Clinical staff could see exactly which physician was on call for which practice at any given moment, route secure HIPAA-compliant communication directly to them, and if the primary was unreachable, the system automatically escalated to the backup within a configurable window of thirty minutes or less. The nursing staff knew it worked because they felt it work. The friction that had been part of their daily reality was gone.
Shad departed after the pilot was operational and gaining traction. The work was done: an idea had become a functioning clinical communication system, deployed in a live healthcare environment, built to the compliance and reliability standards that environment demands.
The lesson Converge360™ carries forward: the clearest measure of whether a system works is whether the people who depend on it stop worrying about it.