Valentina Gissin, Chief People Officer at Curana Health

Show Notes

Change People Can Absorb: Curana Health’s CPO on AI, Compliance, and Product‑Minded HR

Summary

How do you lead a frontline care workforce through constant change—without burning them out?

Valentina Gissin, Chief People Officer at Curana Health, shares how her team improves care for seniors while helping 2,000+ providers embrace change, work smarter, and stay focused on patients.

She explains why the real limiter isn’t your roadmap—it’s how much change your organization can metabolize—and how she creates capacity by carving out paid time for providers to preview what’s coming and understand the “why.”

Valentina breaks down a pragmatic AI strategy that keeps clinicians in their “genius zone” with just‑in‑time guidance (not decisions), and reframes compliance as a design feature, not a blocker.

She also discusses the expanding remit of modern people teams—acting like business operators with P&L fluency—and how to navigate today’s messy HR tech market by thinking like a product leader and building before buying. Expect clear, field-tested tactics for change adoption, AI enablement, and resourcing people teams to do more with less.

Timestamps

[00:45] – Guest intro: Curana Health’s model, mission, and frontline provider workforce

[01:51] – The challenge: startup velocity, uncertainty, and reframing change for clinicians

[04:35] – Measuring “capacity for change”: time studies, prioritization, and creating flex

[05:58] – Creating paid time to absorb change and arming leaders with a clear “why”

[07:54] – Practical AI: keeping providers in their genius zone with just‑in‑time best practices

[10:50] – Compliance as a feature: HIPAA, “code as law,” and why digitization increases rigor

[12:49] – Doing more with less: CPO as business operator, KPIs, and nontraditional HR talent

[16:20] – HR tech strategy: build before you buy, product mindset, and what to look for in vendors

[19:45] – Parting advice: self‑care, curiosity, and designing from first principles

Takeaways

- Audit your org’s capacity for change; run time studies and pace initiatives to what teams can absorb.

- Create paid, protected time for employees to preview changes and internalize the “why.”

- Use AI to surface just‑in‑time guidance so experts spend more time on care, less on admin.

- Treat compliance as a design constraint and advantage—build rules into technology workflows.

- Evolve people teams into business operators: tie HR work to company KPIs and P&L outcomes.

- Think like a product leader: prototype AI automations, prefer built‑in features, and only buy tools that solve clearly defined problems.

Sponsor

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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 chat with Valentina Gissin, the Chief People Officer at Curana Health. Welcome, Valentina.

Valentina (00:41)
Yes, sir. Yes.

Thank you, Emily. I'm so excited to be here.

Emily Fenech (00:49)
Yeah, it's great to chat with you. For those who aren't familiar with Curana, I'd love to sort of just start with some context. I know it is one of the largest sort of healthcare providers for senior living in the country. And so could you tell us a little bit more about the organization, the people that work there and your role as the Chief People Officer?

Valentina (01:08)
Yeah, I would love to. So, Curana is the leading provider of value-based care for... ⁓

our seniors. Our mission is to improve the health, happiness and dignity of seniors nationwide. And we employ about 2000 plus folks overall, the vast majority of those ⁓ providers who provide, whether it's in a skilled nursing facility or assisted living, senior living, of that nature, Curana brand, very thoughtful, ⁓ preventative and value-based care to our.

Emily Fenech (01:44)
Right, so you don't own the sort of ⁓ facilities themselves, you're providing the care. That's great. So when you think about the folks providing care to this vulnerable population, the people that are employed by Curana in your network, what do you think is the biggest challenge that they're facing in this moment? As we roll into 2026, you're thinking about their needs. ⁓ What are they struggling with day to day?

Valentina (01:49)
That's right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a great question and we ask a lot and we listen a lot ⁓ and so I don't have to guess too much. I know what they're struggling with. And for us, is really like, we are a startup, a fast moving startup and our frontline population is providers who haven't necessarily always worked in the context of a fast moving startup. And so the amount of change that we need to constantly

constantly be thoughtfully enacting to ensure that we're going to fulfill our mission is more than a lot of folks are used to. And so really being thoughtful about how do we... ⁓

How do we change the narrative around change? How do we get people excited about change? How do we make people feel like they're a part of something such that they can understand the value of the change is a really, really top of mind for us as a people team.

And then, you I would say other things are helping them operate more efficiently. There's, you know, there's tons of room for thoughtful AI bolstering of quality medical care. Obviously, like, can't make decisions and there are lots of limits and there are lots of compliance factors involved.

get excited about that stuff. don't fear, I'm not as afraid of technology from a compliance perspective just because I've lived, including as a tech lawyer, many evolutions where we were like, no, this technology is gonna make us non-compliant and it actually works the other way. And so I think that's a big thing, just being thoughtful about, you know, how do we make them more productive. ⁓

And then the other thing is, know, thinking outside of our frontline population, we have a significant administrative and health plan staff. And for those folks really thinking about like they're being asked to do a ton more, they're being asked to embrace AI, they're being asked to do more with less. And so how do we find and elevate the folks that are gonna really thrive in that kind of environment?

Emily Fenech (04:14)
Right. Yeah, I'd love to unpack those. Let's start with the change management piece because I think that, you know, that applies to almost any organization. I think one of the words I continue to hear as I interview people leaders is like uncertainty. Like everyone is sort of living in an environment where we're not quite sure what tomorrow holds, right? And with that is a lot of the velocity of change and the amount of adapting that all people are having to do, right? So as a people leader,

How are you addressing that? How are you sort of balancing the need to be able to pivot very, very quickly in this environment with people's anxiety and the fact that too much change can be really hard and really disruptive. How are you balancing that?

Valentina (04:57)
Yeah.

Yeah. And.

I think being thoughtful about change and prioritizing change and like really having an eye towards how much change can the organization metabolize, like successfully rather than just what do we want to get done is a really important piece of that. And so understanding that, like how much can the organization absorb peace is a really important step that I think, particularly when new people leaders step in or new leaders in a lot of functions that touch everyone

or like, wanna have a ton of impact and you know, I wanna build all these things. But really your pace of success is based on the pace that your changes can actually be successfully absorbed. And so one of the things that I do is I will always do a study when I join any company of how like is our frontline. ⁓

employee categories that we have. How are people really spending their time ⁓ so that I can understand how much flex there is, if any, for people to do change management work, thinking, like mind share, as well as other things that people may not think of as their day-to-day job, but actually are, like having coaching conversations with your people.

And so one of the things that we learned very quickly was that there just wasn't flex in people's schedules to be able to talk and think about change. So we created a space essentially for all of our providers to be able to take time off, we still pay them for this, and we will give them a preview of everything that is coming with the clear why, ⁓ and then arm their leaders to take them over the

But arming them with the Y has been a really, really, really huge step.

Emily Fenech (06:47)
I don't think I've ever heard anyone approach it that way. I love that you're actually carving out the time. So it's not like, hey, yeah.

Valentina (06:54)
mean, that's the real challenge, right? Is like people

are like, is this gonna make me slower? Do I have to learn it? Like, is it gonna give me more clicks? And so helping people understand why that this is gonna speed you up and yes, creating the space for them to actually internalize that information is just does so much in terms of like the initial getting over the denial to acceptance.

Emily Fenech (07:19)
Yes, and that third step is what I think is often overlooked, right? The carving out the time. And the why, sometimes the why is missing as well. People just throw a lot of change at their people and ⁓ forget the very important. I often hear like slow down to go faster. Like it does take time to put together a communication plan. It might delay you a couple of days to really get down to a very important why. And yet in the long run, that's gonna.

Valentina (07:25)
Yep.

Emily Fenech (07:45)
make it a lot easier for people to understand, adopt, get on board. So slow down to go faster.

Valentina (07:49)
Yes. Saves so much time. It saves so much

time if you can thoughtfully understand people's drivers, what's gonna cause them to buy in and have a good conversation with them about what's coming.

Emily Fenech (08:02)
Yeah, great advice. Second thing you mentioned was efficiency and you got really excited about AI, I can tell. So I'd love to just explore that a little bit deeper in terms of leveraging technology to make your workforce more efficient. What has that looked like for you?

Valentina (08:09)
You

Yeah.

Yeah. we have a pretty, know, AI is in a really interesting spot right now because I think everyone feels like they have to use it. Like you have to incorporate it. And so we got a lot of folks out there like looking for problems to solve with AI. A lot of solutions, a of tools out there that feel like a little bit of ⁓ a solution looking for a problem. ⁓ But there's also, you know, there's real meaningful work.

that we can do as people leaders and as leaders in general. But again, it comes back to like really understanding what the work is and.

I think increasingly that is the role of the people team and the CPO is understand what the work is and ensure the work is aligned to the strategy and then understand who the people are that are doing the work and ensure that the people are doing the right work in a way that they also are very happy and engaged, right? Like our job is becoming.

make people leveraged at scale while having empathy at scale. And that is a very interesting balance. And so we have a pretty robust AI roadmap of really enabling our providers to stay in the genius zone. examples might be...

we have, you know, they have to do all of their notes and we have a set of recommendations based on a variety of conditions in terms of what best practices might be. So now we're moving in a direction where when a provider finishes their notes, they'll get a pop-up saying, you know, like, here's Kieranah's in like model of care, best practices based on what you're seeing with this patient. ⁓ They don't have to follow that, of course, but it will help them find the stuff that right now they're searching our

for being like, I know there was this really good guidance on falls and it's gonna meet them right where they are just in time, which I'm super excited about. And really all of our AI initiatives are around that on the provider side, getting providers to spend time thinking about healing rather than doing administrative work and helping them make better decisions, but obviously make the right decisions that their medical expertise indicates.

Emily Fenech (10:31)
Yes, that's my favorite use case for AI. I work at All Voices and something our tool does is it's context aware of what you're working on and then just surfaces things that might be helpful. So again, like not replacing human judgment. I think that's particularly scary for employee relations, but also in healthcare, right? You don't want AI making judgment calls about your treatment.

or your care, but what you do want is for the person who is making those judgment calls to be focused more on you than they are, like you said, digging through spreadsheets, digging through knowledge bases, whatever it is at your organization, right? It's just like, hey, here's all your policies or here's all your training. Here's, yeah. Best practice. Yeah. So that's wonderful. I love that. ⁓

Valentina (11:11)
Here's the best practice, you you decide.

And I think,

I would say the other big piece of it is, people get nervous about HIPAA, compliance, all of these things in the context of new technologies. But like I said before, I think I had a law professor who wrote this book called Code and the Other Laws of Cyberspace way back in like 2003. And basically what he said was, technical laws,

are actually stronger and easier to enforce rules, are more fully enforceable. Like if you walk into a firewall, not only can you not get through it, but you may not even know that it's there. So you can't even mess up. And so, you know, we saw something very similar, a lot of fear when medical offices were being asked to go digital, like how are we gonna remain HIPAA compliant? Well, the evidence has shown that we are much more compliant as a result of having gone digital.

because the technology follows the compliance rules more precisely than a human can. And so that's the other piece where like I've just been very like we are compliance team, everyone is right on board in the mix. But also we understand that compliance is a feature. It's not a bug with these new technical advancements. And I think that's really important for folks that are fearful, build it in and it will actually be more compliant than your human decision makers in a lot.

Emily Fenech (12:38)
Yeah, love that. The last thing you focused on was just the do more with less. And I think what I recall from that, we've covered a lot of ground already, but it's just that people are feeling, you what are your people struggling with? Are they feeling the pressure to do more with less? Is that?

Valentina (12:52)
I think people teams in general and SG &A teams across the board are being asked to take on more. think people teams in particular.

are like the chief people officers becoming a bit of everything. Like the role has changed very drastically. And so we have people teams that are being at like long gone are the days when you can ask a CHRO what the top line revenue is and they can look at you blankly.

CHROs have to be real business leaders now. And so we're being asked to deliver bottom line results. know, company KPIs have to move based on things we do, ⁓ otherwise we're not doing the right things. We're being asked to be the OD, the experts on like, like I said, does the work achieve the mission? Not just are the people doing the right work.

And we're being asked to thoughtfully integrate this incredible new technology that is gonna change the world in ways that we don't know how. And we're still stuck in the middle of this rock and a hard place between Gen Z and millennial leadership teams who are like, I don't know how to manage remotely on the one hand and reality on the other. And so all of that coming together, I think is really just asking people teams and people leaders to be like,

COO type functions and that we're not we're not we're not asking for additional resources We may be asking for different resources like I have a lot of people on my team who are not HR like legacy HR folks They're something different But I think that's the biggest thing is like I think the people team is really being asked to do a lot more than it historically has which is great and it's one of the most exciting times ⁓ to be in the space

But also with that comes the need to think more expansively, to know about things beyond HR, to understand how the business works. And it's a lot and it's exciting, but it's also hard and the hard is what makes it fun.

Emily Fenech (14:52)
Very well said. I think there is sort of a, I often see like LinkedIn posts, you know, there's two types of HR. There's like this legacy sort of definition that carries a lot of, I don't know, work, planning parties. I just feel like that is, is quickly dying off. I don't think, I don't think any, I don't think fast growing companies want that brand of HR anymore. I actually rarely see it.

Valentina (15:06)
Yeah.

They're

not posting that in their roles. And that's not what they're looking for when they're going out. They're looking for people who have, oftentimes looking for people who have business experience outside of HR so that HR can really be the business function that it needs to be because we are in some ways responsible for the biggest piece of P &L.

Emily Fenech (15:23)
That's right.

One more question for you about, I typically ask about sort of like AI tools or tools usage. We've already covered that. I'm curious for you, you mentioned HR is getting so broad. And if you look at just the landscape of just like platforms, tools, technology, that can be overwhelming, right? I think the same is true for in the marketing space as well. there's so much to consume. Any sort of...

Valentina (16:01)
You're welcome.

Emily Fenech (16:06)
advice, tips, strategies when you're looking to sort of equip your people team with the right set of tools to navigate this new era, right? What are you looking for?

Valentina (16:14)
Yeah,

that's a great question. I think we do, if you look across a lot of HR tech stacks right now, unless people have been incredibly deliberate, it's a little bit of a confuttled mess. And it's really hard to have been incredibly deliberate because each turn of the crank on AI has been pretty hard to predict. And so, ⁓

Emily Fenech (16:37)
Mm-hmm.

Valentina (16:39)
It's a few things. think first and foremost is a lot of the tools right now are, super cool, but they're, they're typically have a lot of bells and whistles that may not be.

like specific to the problem you're trying to solve. And so my biggest piece of advice to leaders across the board right now actually is it's so accessible right now to be able to create agents, to be able to automate processes with AI is like treat yourself as a product leader because that is what you are.

get a tech resource and build a solution to a problem that you have. And the reason why I so strongly recommend that is you will be such a more intelligent consumer of all of these products if you hold yourself accountable to understanding how it works. And it's not that hard. I mean, yes, it is technical, but it's also really interesting.

and it's very doable and you might surprise yourself. And I've done quite a few of those and I'm not really purchasing that many AI tools right now. Very excited about the Workday and Lattice collaboration. I think that is gonna be a really powerful GPS to folks and like navigating all of the noise. But for the most part, if it's not AI functionality built into something you already have, my advice is just try, try and build something.

Emily Fenech (18:02)
Yeah, we built a, I built something with lovable that was ⁓ sort of translated a lot of our onboarding documentation into more of like a guided experience. Essentially building like a train you all and myself. And I might still buy something because the cost of maintaining it, but like you said, right, knowing it really helps you surface like what you want and what you don't want when you're the architect. Yeah.

Valentina (18:12)
Yeah.

Yes.

100 % 100 % and

it and it helps you understand like what you're buying and whether it's reasonable and it just makes you a much more intelligent consumer and Frankly, like if you're a people leader and you're not getting smart on AI It's gonna be really hard for you to be a people leader or five ten years from now

Emily Fenech (18:43)
That's right. And I will say the market is shifting as someone who is on the HR tech side when it's night and day from a year ago, the questions we were getting versus now. It's just the buyers are so much more educated. They arrive knowing exactly what they want, clear governance, clear questions, which is refreshing. It makes our job a heck of a lot easier when the buyer knows exactly.

exactly what they want. And so when someone arrives now and doesn't, you're kind of like, oh, you know, that's, yeah, what are you doing? Well, this has been a great conversation. We've covered so much. there any sort of parting words of advice for people who might be listening? Like there's a lot going on in the world, like as we all know, right? It's the world is changing for people leaders. What do you have for us?

Valentina (19:13)
How have you been?

Yeah. Yeah. It's...

Yeah, I think my biggest piece of advice is take care of yourself. It is a hard job. And be curious. Like, don't let the work of even last year color your assumptions as to what the work of next year is gonna be like because the world is changing so fast and the more curious you can be and the more you can design from first principles.

the more you will actually be able to impact whatever business needs your particular company.

Emily Fenech (20:05)
Thank you so much. I really enjoyed this, Valentina. Thank you for being here.

Valentina (20:08)
Me too.

This has been great. Thank you. Alright, bye.

Emily Fenech (20:11)
Take care.