Aug 11, 2025
Christine "Chrissy" Sullivan started her career at a small community hospital in rural Vermont, where she learned how important it is for hospital leaders to maintain relationships with frontline staff.
For example, the Chief Nursing Officer consistently greeted nurses by name and took time for friendly conversations in the cafeteria. The CEO routinely visited the emergency department to check in on staff and their well-being. On one occasion, the ER director ran into Chrissy at a local coffee shop and insisted on paying for her breakfast.
Nurse managers and educators demonstrated exceptional dedication, even coming in overnight to provide support on the floor during staffing shortages. These leaders weren’t merely visible — they were actively involved and deeply embedded within the team and the broader community.
“When nurses feel seen, supported, and valued by leadership, it strengthens the entire organization,” Chrissy says.
Formative experiences such as these helped convince Chrissy that she could deliver a greater impact on her colleagues as a clinical educator than as a frontline caregiver.
Today, as a Clinical Solutions Architect at Elemeno Health, Chrissy works with nursing educators, physicians, and healthcare leaders to develop bite-sized microlearning resources to support their clinical teams.
“I love working with Elemeno Health because I genuinely believe we are supporting healthcare providers where they need it most – at the point of care,” she says.
A drive to create better nurse education
Chrissy was inspired to enter the nursing profession at a young age after witnessing the high level of care and attention that nurses provided to her grandfather after he had experienced a stroke.
“They cared for him with such compassion and skill, and supported our entire family,” she says. “I felt called to become a nurse and do the same for my patients someday.”
After six years as an emergency nurse and serving as a content author for a Certified Emergency Nurse exam prep book, Chrissy transitioned to working as a Nurse Professional Development Specialist at a satellite emergency department in Boston, Massachusetts, where she helped oversee nursing education, manage new hire orientation, and ensure regulatory readiness.
“I found myself creating binders full of how-to guides and quick references for everything from ESI (Emergency Severity Index) triage to ventilator management, but I knew that wasn’t enough,” she says. “Education needs to be accessible, shareable, and available at the point of care.”
Realizing that she needed a change that would enable her to influence the future of nursing education, she searched for new roles at nurse-driven companies and discovered Elemeno Health on LinkedIn.
“I read about Elemeno’s just-in-time microlearning model, and I knew I had to be a part of its mission to empower clinicians and transform nursing education,” she says.
In her role at Elemeno, Chrissy recently collaborated with nurse executives from three major institutions to develop a comprehensive Nurse Manager Orientation Guide, which is an innovative, first-of-its-kind just-in-time resource that covers essential topics that nurse managers need to know, with details customized to their own hospital and unit.
Through surveys of new managers conducted at each hospital, Chrissy and her team began by identifying their most significant skills gaps – where they lacked the resources and support necessary to succeed in their roles.
In response, they created the guide which addresses key areas such as budget and finance, staff management, strategic planning, quality improvement, legal and regulatory compliance, patient experience initiatives, and employee wellness. The team first launched the guide at UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital, and with incredibly positive feedback from new managers, the guide is now being deployed into more hospitals.
“It’s so rewarding to see how this resource is already making an impact in helping new leaders feel more confident and supported in their roles,” Chrissy says.
Understaffed or under-resourced?
Going forward, Chrissy hopes to continue helping health systems overcome one of the most critical issues facing the profession today: a shortage of experienced nurses who are willing and able to share their knowledge with the next generation of young nurses.
“Nurses today aren’t just understaffed, they’re under-resourced, often left without the tools or support they need to thrive,” she says.
By providing accessible, practical resources at the point of care, Elemeno Health is enabling hospitals to bridge that gap, helping support caregivers on the frontlines, reinforcing best practices, and easing some of the pressures nurses face every day.
In terms of advice she would offer to young nurses, Chrissy says to strive to provide the quality of care that they hope their loved ones receive. “Never forget that it is a privilege to be at the bedside instead of in the bed,” she says.
Working with Elemeno has opened Chrissy’s eyes to the many roles that nurses can take on, from education to technology to law to health policy.
“While direct patient care will always be the foundation of nursing practice, it is just as important to have nursing voices shaping the systems that surround it,” she says. “Nurses belong in every room where decisions about healthcare are being made.”
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