Dr. Donna C. Montgomery
Zia Health Informatics
Dr. Donna Montgomery partners with hospital and health system leaders to advise, lead, or implement — filling the exact gap standing between your organization and what it's trying to accomplish.
Dr. Donna C. Montgomery
DNP, MBA, RN, NI-BC, NEA-BC
Donna has spent her career where clinical care, technology, and operations intersect — and where most organizations discover they don't have enough hands to hold it all together.
She has built informatics leadership functions inside large Magnet-designated health systems, and she has sat on the vendor side, running quarterly business reviews across 200+ hospitals to keep technology investments aligned with the outcomes they were supposed to deliver — from evidence-based practice to faster patient throughput. She has evaluated clinical systems for readiness, built the training that got staff to adopt the technology, and led the teams responsible for making it stick.
That range is the point. Donna isn't a specialist you call for one narrow problem. She's the person organizations call when the problem touches leadership, clinical practice, technology, and change all at once — and when there isn't time to bring three different people up to speed before the work can start.
Direct counsel to CNOs, CCOs, and hospital executives navigating decisions that need experience in the room for execution.
Strategy and hands-on leadership for informatics programs — from building the function to running it through a critical stretch.
Evaluation, workflow-based testing, and training design that gets new clinical technology actually used by the people it was built for.
Identifying where clinical and operational friction is slowing patient throughput, causing extra time for staff, impeding safety, and increasing burden for staff — and redesigning around it.
Turning executive vision into a plan with measurable outcomes, KPIs, and a realistic path to adoption.
Standing up new clinical or informatics programs from the ground up, or revising what is already in place to provide structure, staffing model, adoption, and governance.
Bringing skeptical stakeholders and cross-functional teams to genuine adoption, not just sign-off.
Experienced leadership in the seat while you search, restructure, or carry an initiative through a defined window.
We need experienced leadership in this role, but not a full-time headcount.
We're rolling out new clinical technology and it needs to actually get adopted, not just installed.
We've been working on this issue for months and we're not getting the movement we expected. We need an experienced second set of eyes.
We're in the middle of a clinical transformation and we need someone who has led one successfully before.
We have the strategy. We need someone who can actually execute it.
Our team is already stretched, and this initiative can't wait for bandwidth to open up.
Donna holds a Doctor of Nursing Practice and an MBA, along with board certifications in both Nursing Informatics (NI-BC) and Advanced Nurse Executive Leadership (NEA-BC) — a combination that lets her move fluently between the clinical floor, the boardroom, and the technology behind both.
Her work has touched patient safety programs, operational efficiencies, improvement in workflow and designated KPIs, and the informatics infrastructure that large health systems depend on to run safely at scale.
Executive and clinical informatics leadership within one of the nation's largest not-for-profit health systems.
Clinical and operational leadership at the hospital level and regional level.
Vendor-side strategy and account leadership across large hospital networks.
Independent advisory work bridging clinical operations and technology implementations.
The Zia symbol comes from New Mexico — four rays extending from a single circle, traditionally representing the four directions, the four seasons, the four times of day, and the four stages of life. Four distinct forces, bound together as one.
That's the idea behind this practice. Healthcare problems rarely live in one discipline. The technology issue is also a workflow issue. The workflow issue is also a leadership issue. The leadership issue is also a safety issue. Solving any one of them in isolation usually just moves the problem somewhere else.
Zia Health Informatics exists to bring those disciplines together in one place — clinical, technical, operational, and strategic — so the organizations Donna works with get a solution built for how healthcare actually works, not how it looks on an org chart.
— Donna
A 15-minute call is usually enough to know whether this is the right fit — and if it's not, Donna will tell you that too.
Schedule a 15-Minute Consultation →