
Episode #23
Leading Your Team Through AI Fears
Every hospital leader claims AI is transforming care. But how do you tell what's actually working from what's just hype? Joe Avelino is CEO of College Medical Center, a behavioral health and acute care hospital in Long Beach, California, with a dedicated geriatric psychiatric program for older adults. He's also been a nurse, a soldier, and a hospital executive — and it shows in how he thinks about leadership. In this episode, Joe walks through where College Medical Center actually stands with AI: the specific tools they're testing (from AI-assisted documentation in Cerner to an AI-generated plan of correction), how he separates real efficiency gains from tools that just move a metric, and how he leads a clinical staff through the skepticism and fear that come with any new technology.

