Pam Teufel, Senior Vice President, CHRO at Main Line Health

Show Notes

From Bots to Bedside: Mainline Health’s CHRO on AI, Capacity, and Trust

Summary

Healthcare never slows down—so how do people leaders modernize without burning out their teams?

Pam Teufel, Chief Human Resources Officer at Mainline Health (14,000 employees; four acute-care hospitals, a behavioral health facility, and hundreds of ambulatory sites), shares how she prioritizes capacity, trust, and practical technology in a no-rest era.

Pam pulls back the curtain on the “invisible work” of HR—from leading a CEO transition to risk-managing every hire and termination—and why designing systems around the end user is the only path to effective AI.

She details real wins: a ServiceNow-powered HR service center, a hackathon-built chatbot that answers high-volume leave-of-absence questions for an 80% female workforce, and clinical AI that reduces charting “pajama time,” triages urgent radiology, and automates nurse discharge education.

Expect a grounded playbook on sequencing change, leading with empathy for frontline realities, and growing learning agility so teams can keep up without burning out.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Mainline Health overview and Pam’s path to CHRO

[02:41] – The invisible work: CEO search, risk mitigation, and fixing legacy systems

[03:59] – Process before AI: design for end users, not administrators

[05:07] – Managing the no-rest pace: capacity calls that prevent burnout

[08:21] – Lead with empathy to rebuild trust across frontline teams

[10:54] – Practical wins: ServiceNow HR service center and an LOA chatbot

[14:59] – From bots to bedside: ambient scribing, radiology triage, and nurse discharge education

[20:24] – Career advice: skill building and learning agility

Takeaways

- Design HR tech around end users and clean processes first—then automate and augment with AI.

- Protect team capacity by sequencing projects; say no or “not yet” to prevent burnout.

- Lead with empathy for frontline realities (transportation, shift work) to rebuild trust and retention.

- Use chatbots for high-volume, policy-stable topics (e.g., leaves of absence) to free HR for higher-value conversations.

- Apply clinical AI to remove administrative burden (ambient scribing, triage, discharge education) and communicate intent clearly to reduce job anxiety.

- Hire and reward learning agility—continuous upskilling will outpace static skills.

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What is HR Voices?

HR Voices is a scenario-based podcast for People Leaders who’ve actually had to make the call.

Each episode brings experienced HR and People leaders into realistic, anonymized workplace scenarios—the kind you recognize immediately. Performance issues. Messy conflicts. Investigations that don’t fit neatly into a policy box. Instead of talking about their own companies, guests react to outside cases and walk through how they’d think it through in real time.

There are no right answers here. What you’ll hear is judgment: how seasoned leaders balance risk, fairness, legal reality, and humanity when the stakes are high and the path isn’t obvious.

HR Voices is for HR, People Ops, legal, and leaders who want to hear how other smart humans actually handle employee relations—without confidentiality breaches, hypotheticals that feel fake, or a lecture on “best practices.”

Emily Fenech (00:35)
Welcome to HR Voices. I'm your host, Emily Fenech and today I get to hang out with Pam Teufel the CHRO at Mainline Health. Welcome, Pam. I'm so glad you're here. So Mainline Health is a system of hospitals and care facilities in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Can you tell us a little bit more about your organization, the people that work there, and your role?

Pam Teufel (00:44)
Thank you for having me.

Good

Sure, I'm the Chief Human Resources Officer and in March I'll have been here five years. We have about 14,000 employees, four acute care hospitals, we have a behavioral health facility, hundreds of ambulatory facilities, ⁓ doctor practices. We're about two and a half billion in revenue. And really, I think are surviving better than most health systems. We've had actually a couple hospitals close in our market over the last

really five years that has really greatly impacted us, but I think we're doing well.

Emily Fenech (01:34)
That's good. I also saw you recently received a lifetime achievement award presented by the HR Department of the Year awards. First of all, congratulations. Your post went viral on LinkedIn. It seems like you have a lot of support. You must be doing something right. Can you tell us a little bit more about, I mean, you don't look old enough to have a lifetime. You have a whole lifetime ahead of you. So that's why I kind of chuckled at first. But tell me a little bit more about what that was like.

Pam Teufel (01:57)
So John Toohey and a group of folks that I've known since I moved to the market in 2010 started this really recognition of HR. So there's a department of the year award, there's COE awards you can apply for. And really Scott Rosen started it and said, HR doesn't get enough recognition for all the good that they do. Well, one of the other awards they do is lifetime achievement. So when he called me, I was like, how old do you think I am? I was like, I'm not retiring

which he has said to me they might change it to be called Impact Award. But I said, sure, I'm humbled, I'm honored to receive the recognition. I am not close to retirement, unfortunately. So he did say maybe I could win it again in about 10 years.

Emily Fenech (02:34)
Yeah.

There you go. Yeah, that was funny. I agree with you, though. I've been, I'm not an HR myself, but it's my job to get to know HR people and talk to them. And I think one thing that I hear between the lines, HR doesn't complain quite a bit, but what I've learned is that so much of the role is invisible. Some because it has to be, and some just because.

HR wear so many hats, right? There's so much that they're responsible for. Could you talk to me a little bit more about the invisible work of HR?

Pam Teufel (03:22)
Yeah, so part of it is, you know, one for me was I had a 20 year CEO that was retiring. And so I had to wear the hat of lead the board of directors through an external search.

You know, that's not normally something you do. You usually do hiring internally. So that was a whole different hat that I had to wear. You know, we agonize over every decision we make, right? We try to mitigate risk every time we hire and fire, right? We want to do that well. That sounds weird, but you want to do it well so that you don't have risk to the organization. You know, we're dealing with a lot of technology that is antiquated, right? Our health system has wonderful technology in our

clinical areas, our corporate areas are not as strong. And so we have to do a lot of patching to get things to work. And we really sort of quietly do that behind the scenes and we don't really talk about it. So it is not for the faint of heart is what I say.

Emily Fenech (04:17)
Absolutely. Yeah, and if you think about the number of functions HR is responsible for and you think of the tooling required for each function and then you think of the connection between them and the context switching, like you can easily visualize this web of data and complexity and process that, not for the faint of heart, is a good way to put it, right? It's a lot.

Pam Teufel (04:41)
Yeah, it is a lot. I do, I mean, this happened probably 10 years ago and I like technology a lot. And so, you people talk about AI, but pre-AI, was really just every COE. You have to know how to drive your technology to get what you want out of it and to make it a delightful employee experience. That's one of the things I push a lot. You know, we like to design technology around us, but we really should be designing about the end user. How do they get the things out of it ⁓ or use it simplistically? And in my version,

so they can get back out on the floor. But you have to understand technology. Otherwise, you're not going to get to AI because you have to have good processes, you have to have good systems, and then you can get to, can you augment or automate that work?

Emily Fenech (05:23)
Mm-hmm. Yeah, if everything's messy, you're just going to automate messy, Yeah, we haven't, I not everything has changed.

Pam Teufel (05:27)
Yep. Yep. Garbage in, garbage out.

Right,

right, exactly. That's still true.

Emily Fenech (05:36)
I'm curious, I always take the end of the year, we're at the end of 2025 as we record this. I'm curious what's on your mind, what challenges you faced in 2025 that are on your mind as we roll into the new year.

Pam Teufel (05:51)
Part of what I think I still personally and then I think our leaders struggle with is, and people keep saying it, but it is the pace of change, right? It's just, it's nonstop.

I had a couple of personal things happen this week, like my windshield broke or cracked. My husband got sick and I got in a little pity party and then I was like, you know what? You just got to suck it up and roll with it. Like, but it's really easy to at work say, I just can't handle this pace. I'm like, or.

I like say you put your big girl pants on and you just go out there and do it. ⁓ So there's no, there's no rest time anymore is what I feel like. I feel like it used to be a little bit more cyclical. You'd know you're going to have a rush in the fall. You might have a rush in the winter, but summer is going to be easy, at least in healthcare. It's no longer that it's, it's a constant push and drive to plan for the next thing and then to evaluate your capacity. And so what I worry about deeply is the capacity of my team.

the senior team, and then the staff that are going to do the work because we do throw a lot at them. And so it's, you know, we just had a call yesterday about a piece of technology that we really needed to put in, but I just said, I don't think we have the capacity to do it. And even though I know everybody wants it, like I think we have to wait and put it in next fiscal year. Those are difficult decisions that like I agonize over. like, you know, cause I want to do a lot of stuff, but if I overrun my team,

I'm gonna burn them out and then they're gonna leave and so I can't risk that and so sometimes you have to be kept to know to say let's wait and plan it. So I worry a lot about capacity.

Emily Fenech (07:30)
Yeah, I mean, I'd like to unpack two things you said. The first one, don't let me forget the second one, because that's a bad habit of mine, capacity. But the first one was just the no time for rest. I feel like we're living a little bit parallel lives because I had the same thought last week. I sprained my ankle, car trouble, all the like exact same things. And when one...

Pam Teufel (07:35)
Okay.

Yes.

Emily Fenech (07:51)
you know, person in your life or one state, your car, a stable thing you rely on that your car can get you to point B. When that goes out, I mean, that house of cards can really come down, like all the meetings, all the pressure, all the things that we're overly committed to. And it feels like I don't have time for my car to break down, but you like that happens. It still happens. Yeah.

Pam Teufel (08:11)
Yep. Yeah. I, I Ubered from, uh, I had to, had a

potluck today. I had to, I signed up for a dish. I was like, why did I sign up? So in the Uber I had my potluck and I ended up, the plus was I had a wonderful conversation with the Uber driver. And then I said to myself, Sina, wasn't that nice? Like, like, you know, you didn't want to do it. And it was really a hassle, but it ended up being a nice moment. We had a nice chat about healthcare.

Emily Fenech (08:22)
Yes!

Yeah.

There you go. It is a mindset, you know, it's easy to quickly go to a place of, like you said, a pity party, but these things have a way of working. I mean, I'm still here. It's Wednesday. We got through it. Do you know what mean? But ⁓ the panic that sets in when something goes wrong is not just something felt by us as individuals, but you you represent thousands of people living lives full of disruption, you know, and that

Point two, capacity, right? Like I think something that leaders often fail to plan for is like the unplannable, not just personal lives, but the things at work that are invisible, right? So every project, yeah.

Pam Teufel (09:15)
Well, what I like-

Yeah,

what I like to tell leaders to think about is like, so that happened to you and how did you feel? So imagine all 14,000 employees, you I think a lot about our support services employees who make less than $50,000, right? They all have to have a second job. They can't sustain a livable wage, right? With one job. So they have two jobs. They're relying on public transportation. Public transportation is late. They're late for work. It's not their fault. The bus was late. And so just

just

consider that they have a harder life or even if you don't want to give them credit for harder, they have challenges just like you do. Acknowledge when they're walking in the door, they have difficulties. And so I don't think you have to give them 100 breaks, you know, but at least be empathetic, like lead with empathy, be understanding. And like maybe you don't want to rail them if they're five minutes late because the bus was late. Like maybe you want to consider, does that matter? Can you accommodate that? And then just move

on. ⁓ They'll be grateful. They'll trust you more because that's another thing I worry a lot about is ⁓ I think we've lost a lot of trust in the workforce.

I don't think people trust their managers. I don't think managers trust their employees. And when you don't have that trust, that's going to mean turnover. People are just not going to stay. And in health care, that really hurts us. If we don't have people, patients aren't signing up for when they'll go in the hospital, unless it's a surgery. They're coming. And so if we don't have staff to take care of them, we're in big trouble.

Emily Fenech (10:52)
Yeah, absolutely. I like the leading with humanity. it's almost worth it to get everyone together. Everyone share a disruption in your life. Because we all have them, right? Just to humanize everybody a little bit. Like managers aren't out to get you. You're not, employees aren't trying to pull one over. Like, but we do. It's almost like a cultural shift that we all kind of operate with that suspicious distrustful mentality. It's really unfortunate because when you get to know a person, rarely is that the case.

Pam Teufel (11:19)
Right, I my joke is, people don't wake up and say I want to get fired today. I do think there's maybe 1 % of the population that does. That's my joke that I use, but not the majority. So they want to be here, they want to work, they just might be having something that gets in their way.

Emily Fenech (11:35)
I'd love to hear a little bit more about technology. So you mentioned that some of the systems are a little bit behind and that you're pumping the brakes intentionally because you don't want to overwhelm your team. I commend you for that. Is there anything that you have done that you have prioritized because of the obvious time savings or workflow improvements?

Pam Teufel (11:55)
So we use ServiceNow in our Shared Service Center. I do think what I like about that tool is we've been able to give expanded access to our employees, give them more data at their fingertips.

But admittedly, people still struggle to find the answer, right? Even though we have hundreds of knowledge articles, people can't find them. So one of the things IT led, which I was very excited about, and my head of Total War Awards participated is, we did a hackathon and they created a bot for Leaves of Absence. Now we won the hackathon, so it was a multidisciplinary group that came together, but my leader got the credit for it. It was his idea, and it really was just using

all the information we already had in a way where an employee can go on, they can chat with this bot, because we're 80 % women in healthcare. And so, which is pretty normal, we have a lot of babies, we have a lot of leaves of absence, we have a lot of FML, and even in Pennsylvania it's not that complicated, but it is complicated. What's going happen to my job, what's going to happen to my benefits, so it's one of our top questions that sort of bombs out the service center. ⁓

And so creating the bot to make it easier on employees, give them the answer quicker, let them be calm down about, okay, what's going to happen when I go out on leave? And so we're in production now. So I think that's very cool. I'd like to do more of that where it's like, look, let's just make it easier for employees to get the answer. Let's also save our HR people from having to answer that same question over and over and free up their capacity to do higher level work. Right? I would rather spend time

with an employee talking about their career goals and their career development, then it would explain you to leave. Now, we'll do it.

It's not really value added. It's value added to that employee in that moment because they need the answer. But if they could get it quicker, because the other piece is no one really wants to call us, right? You know, they want to text, they want to just go on their phone or email. And when you email, you don't get all the questions out, you don't get all the answers. So if I can create a bot for, I mean, I want a bot for everything.

You know, give me a chat bot and I think employees would be much happier with HR.

Emily Fenech (14:11)
Well, I mean, it's, I think that that's an interesting question of it's really hard and it requires a lot of emotional intelligence to draw the line on what it can and can't answer because most people would say, ⁓ human, know, these questions about your future or questions about personal questions. I mean, there's nothing more personal than having a baby in that moment. You know I mean? And yet I think that that's where the emotional intelligence comes in is that.

Pam Teufel (14:30)
Sure. Yep.

Emily Fenech (14:36)
However, if your leave policies aren't drastically changing and you're answering the same questions the same way for every woman that asks you, like they might appreciate the continuity. They might appreciate the speed of response, the thoroughness. ⁓ Yeah. And also like I can't imagine having to answer the same question 1500 times.

Pam Teufel (14:50)
Yep.

Well,

that goes to like, we're trying to attract in our shared service center, you know, college graduates ⁓ into a call center. Let's call it what it is, a call center.

Emily Fenech (15:03)
Mm-hmm.

Pam Teufel (15:08)
It's an HR call center. And I love the idea you come in, you learn how to be a generalist, and then you pick which COE you want to grow your career in. But most people would say, well, I don't want that job. That's a terrible job. And so if it's at least a little more interesting and you could do some higher level conversations with employees, I think you personally as an HR rep would get more engagement. So now I'm keeping it interesting and it's not the same rote work. Now some people are OK with rote work.

Emily Fenech (15:08)
Yeah.

Pam Teufel (15:37)
but not for more than a year. know, most younger folks coming in are going to say, I'm going to do that for a year, but then what's my next job?

Emily Fenech (15:45)
I think of my daughter, my son and the things that they won't have to do. The dues I had to pay, you know, and now I feel like I'm a hundred years old of like, I used to be in spreadsheets with what, know, copying sales over it. But like that was entry level work at the time. Entry level work is looking a lot different. That's a great example from healthcare. Do you have others of just how are expectations of employees changing?

Pam Teufel (15:51)
Right.

Hahaha

Yeah.

Yep.

So, I mean, we certainly are tapping into how can we automate work. Like the clinical side, I think, is the coolest where our doctors are burned out with, they call it pajama time work, right? Charting in at night, right? In their pajamas, right? Because they've seen patients all day, they have to go home and chart. Well, that's not great. And so we have ambient technology that when the doctor's in the room with the patient, I'm a patient, I just went to the doctor and she said, are you familiar with our new technology?

I'm like, yeah turn it on because it records the conversation and then it will say I heard that you need to order a mammogram you need to get your blood drawn and You need an ultrasound, right? So it knows that it writes the order for the doctor doctor gets to review it now It's in the chart that just saved that doctor ten minutes per patient That's beautiful Radiology right our radiologists have scans to read. Well, I just heard a patient story where one of those scans that looks this

got put to the top, the radiologist immediately read it and that we saved that patient's life, right? Now, would we have still saved the patient's life? Maybe, probably, but what if it was the last scan the doctor read?

So that's where I love what AI is doing on the clinical time. Our nurses, our nurses do discharge training for patients, right? You're going to be discharged. This is what you need to know. It's boring. They don't like it. It's very rude. And is there a way, you know, we're putting monitors in every room where you can push the button. It shows the patient a lovely video that could then be emailed to them when they go home. Cause by the way, when they're in the hospital, they're not going to remember anything anyway. And they're going to wake up the next day and said, well,

was my PT I was supposed to do on physical therapy. And so let's save that nurse literally 45 minutes, 45 minutes on average to discharge a patient and have them go do some higher level work. Now, are we gonna get rid of nurses? No. Our nurses work 12 hour shifts, we're gonna staff those units, but we're gonna free them up so maybe they could sit with a patient longer.

and actually just talk to them about how they're feeling, what's happening, what their plan of care is, getting them ready for discharge, like thinking about it mentally. There's so much opportunity that we have. So I love it on the clinical side. We have some nervousness, right? You get a nurse every once in a while, it's like, you trying to take my job? And it's like, don't worry. Like your job is still going to be there. On the administrative side, you know, like I said with that bot, we're trying to free up the

Emily Fenech (18:22)
Yeah.

Pam Teufel (18:53)
very rote administrative data enter keying into a system. People don't really want to do that work and it's ripe for error, which is what always makes me nervous. If I have to hire new hires and I miskey a social security number, that's not great.

So people have said, well, what does that do to entry-level jobs? I still think there's value in entry-level jobs. I think we have to just rethink, what does that look like? And where are those places where you still are going to bring folks in? It might be different. They might never start in a compensation role, but they could start in an HR call center and then work their way up.

Emily Fenech (19:31)
Right. Yeah. I mean, I think it's an exciting time to be in an HR people leader because of all, like some of those use cases just gave me goosebumps. Like I think of AI through the context of, you know, my SAS job and it's not as compelling as some of those clinical use cases, but what an exciting time to redefine things, right? To really rethink things. It's rare you get that opportunity. ⁓

Pam Teufel (19:55)
I agree.

It is exciting. think it's just we have to do a really good job messaging the change and working through the change management with those clinicians so that they understand the why, they understand how it's going to help them in their jobs. And then back to my earlier comment, they have to trust that their leader isn't trying to take their job, right? That they trust that they really are pure in their intentions to make their life better. Now, there are health systems that are saying,

we think now a nurse could take on an extra patient, right? So that's the slippery slope of it. At some point, if the job gets so efficient, could you see another patient? That's where clinicians get nervous. But it is certainly not our intention to do that. just, we want to get rid of the administrative burden on nurses so they're not burned out, like period.

Emily Fenech (20:47)
Yeah, and the paperwork does that for one of my best friends is occupational therapist and all I ever hear from her on Monday is my paperwork's due. I can't talk to you right now. My paperwork like the paperwork burden is so real in healthcare.

Pam Teufel (20:59)
Yeah, charting for any clinician

is a burden and it does mean they can't see more patients. PTOT speech, those, we have to block in like certain amount of hours for them to chart. Like how different is that charting? Now you have to be careful because the government doesn't want you to just cut and paste ⁓ and overbill. That's not good. But on the other hand, like they're pretty much typing the same thing.

Emily Fenech (21:17)
Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm. Yeah, I look forward to seeing too. I think this will be a year or two of where the data gets validated, gets studied a little bit more too. We start to learn more about that across these cases. Well, this has been an excellent conversation, Pam. I really enjoyed the stories, the examples. I love to ask guests to wrap it up with words of encouragement or advice for listeners.

Pam Teufel (21:48)
you know, I would say it's really think I've said this now, I think for the last year, I give everybody the advice to focus on skill building, right? And you're learning aptitude, right? So

on the Hogan profile, like my learning is like an 85. Like I'm somebody who I'm constantly listening to podcasts. I'm reading articles. I don't read as many books as I should because I don't have time. But like I am constantly like, did you read that article? Did you hear that? And I'm thinking about how it's going to change work. It's a little obsession of mine. But what I find is when there's employees that just say,

No, I learned my job, that's it. Those are the people that are definitely going to be left behind. But the people that, even if they don't have the best skills today, if they're willing to upskill, re-skill, learn a new skill, and they're willing to learn, those are going to be the people that will be successful. Because I have a daughter in college, I have a middle one who's a senior, and he's agonizing over like, what should I be when I grow up? Because is that job going to exist?

And I said to him, like, look, I had many jobs in my career. You're going to have to have double the jobs. But as long as you're willing to have an open mind and keep learning, you'll be fine. Right? You'll figure it out. Don't worry about it. You're too young to worry about it.

Emily Fenech (23:09)
He's gonna win his lifetime achievement award at 30. So, at this place. my gosh. That's just youth. I did too. You know, we all thought we were gonna make, I don't know what we thought, but. Well, it's been a joy. Thank you so much, Pam, and enjoy the holidays.

Pam Teufel (23:13)
Yeah, he wants to be retired at 30, so that's his. Yeah.

Yeah.

Thank you, you too. Happy holidays.