We've got this fun problem in my family where viruses just ping-pong from one member to the next. My daughter brings something home from school, it spreads to my wife, then my son, then me. Just when I thought we were all getting over it, my son spiked a 102 fever. The cycle continues…grr…

It's a perfect microcosm of interconnected systems without proper coordination—one weak point affects everyone, problems cascade, and you deal with the same issues repeatedly. Sound familiar? This is exactly what's happening in healthcare systems every day, except when these systems fail, it's not just a mere inconvenience. It's medication errors, missed diagnoses, and provider burnout.

I had a conversation with Jennifer Tunning that got me thinking about these systemic breakdowns and their real consequences. Her journey from fixing computers pulled from Arizona alleyways to designing healthcare technology solutions offers insights into where we've been and where we're headed.

From Alley Picking to Healthcare Operations

Jennifer's story starts in the alleys of Arizona, where as a seven-year-old, she was installing hard drives in computers pulled from the trash. Her family made income by rescuing "perfectly good computers that had X, Y, or Z thing wrong with them," fixing them up, and reselling them. Talk about hustling from an early age.

This early immersion in technology led her to Geek Squad at Best Buy, where she learned something crucial: customer service with high-ticket items means dealing with highly emotional, deregulated humans. The patience and empathy she developed there—recognizing when someone's frustrated and having the privilege of potentially offering a solution—became foundational skills she'd later apply in healthcare.

But here's where her story takes an interesting turn. Jennifer originally went to college for finance, thinking numbers were stable and would provide the security her unstable childhood lacked. One semester in, she was crying to her now-husband about wanting to help people. He suggested social work—a field she'd never even heard of. Within a weekend of research, she'd completely changed her career trajectory.

The Paper Trail Problem

Working in inpatient psych, hospice, and community mental health centers, Jennifer witnessed firsthand how the lack of proper technology infrastructure directly harmed patients. At one hospice, they were hand-typing email summaries to communicate between team members because their EMR was too difficult to use. At a psychiatric hospital still operating on pen and paper, medication administration errors were common—nurses would give medications, get distracted by someone throwing chairs (never a dull moment), not mark it down, and another nurse would come in and administer the same medication again.

"The number of people we sent to the hospital with serotonin syndrome," Jennifer told me, "the number of times patients experienced real and actual harm because we were sharing a sheet of paper that somebody may or may not have had the time or capacity to update."

As someone who understood what computers could do, watching these seemingly simple problems go unfixed was maddening. But it also drove her toward her next evolution: becoming the person responsible for building that internal infrastructure.

The Digital Revolution That Isn't

Here's something that struck me about our conversation: even with the prevalence of EMRs and other digital systems, we're still seeing massive administrative burden driving healthcare burnout. Sometimes the digital solutions are actually worse than the paper they replaced.

Jennifer shared a perfect example from her current private practice. She works with two large online mental health platforms. One has AI note-taking that transforms her bullet points into comprehensive notes, requiring maybe 2-5 minutes of cleanup for an hour-long appointment. The other keeps adding new checkboxes and requirements every week with no AI support—those notes take 10-20 minutes. That's 33% administrative overhead for the same clinical work.

"I look forward to seeing my patients in the EMR where I have AI note-taking versus seeing the patients with the platform that's adding a new checkbox every week," she said. The difference is so significant that she's limiting how many patients she'll see on the more burdensome platform.

The Operator's Perspective

What makes Jennifer unique is that she operates on both sides—as a provider experiencing these systems and as an operator designing them. At Impact Care, where she serves as VP of Clinical Operations, she's working to integrate community health workers into healthcare systems in ways that are both clinically effective and technologically sound.

The longer she's been in her career, the more she's accepted that she's "an operator through and through." Systems, strategy, design, scale—these are where her skills are most joyfully used and most beneficial to organizations.

But here's what I find fascinating about her approach: she's not trying to reinvent the wheel. "There are often three customers we're trying to serve," she explained. "Health plans or health systems that have already invested in technology—I'm not one to reinvent the wheel if we don't need to. So how do we integrate with all the hard work and infrastructure they've already built?"

The Bigger Picture

Jennifer's background in social work brings a systems perspective that's often missing from healthcare technology discussions. She talks about the person-in-environment theory: we have humans with mental and physical health needs, but those humans exist in families, communities, and larger systems. We're barely capturing the medical data and starting to capture behavioral health, but we're missing all these other layers.

"The bigger the layer, the more impact it has both on the volume of people as well as the level of impact on an individual person," she noted.

Community health workers are collecting data nobody else has—they know your favorite football team, your favorite snacks, the social dynamics that affect your health engagement. (And yes, if you're a Giants fan, they'd know why you're depressed and maybe get ahead of that.)

Where We're Headed

The arc of healthcare technology is bending in the right direction, but we're not quite over the curve yet. We have competing priorities—systems designed for fee-for-service trying to accommodate value-based care, resulting in providers clicking 20-40 additional boxes during annual wellness visits instead of focusing on patient care.

But there's hope in the AI revolution that's actually happening now. Not the flashy stuff that gets headlines, but the practical applications like Jennifer's note-taking example. Technology that anticipates needs, learns from data, and helps providers spend more time doing top-of-license work.

The goal is keeping people in their communities, getting care in their communities, rather than ending up in hospitals. As Jennifer put it, having worked in safety net and psychiatric hospitals: "There is truly no human that would rather be in a hospital rather than happy, healthy, and at home."

The Human Connection

What strikes me most about Jennifer's story is how it all comes back to that early lesson from Geek Squad: recognizing when someone's frustrated, having empathy for their situation, and using whatever privilege you have to potentially offer a solution—or at least get in their boat with them and acknowledge that yes, this really does suck.

Whether she's fixing a computer that won't start, helping a patient navigate end-of-life care, or designing systems that let community health workers spend more time with patients instead of clicking boxes, it's all the same core principle: use technology to serve humans better, not to create more barriers between them and the care they need.

The Bottom Line

Jennifer's journey from alley-picking computer parts to leading clinical operations at a healthcare tech startup isn't just a career progression—it's a masterclass in understanding that technology is only as good as its ability to serve the humans who use it. And in healthcare, those humans are often at their most vulnerable moments.

We're not there yet with healthcare technology. We're still dealing with systems that create more clicking instead of more caring. But people like Jennifer, who understand both the technical possibilities and the human realities, give me hope that we're heading in the right direction.

After all, even in paradise, sometimes you need someone who knows how to fix what's broken and has the patience to help you through it. Just maybe keep your kids away from mine until this cold thing passes.

Want to connect with Jennifer or learn more about Impact Care's work integrating community health workers into healthcare systems? You can find her on LinkedIn.