Greater Raleigh Chamber Blog

Healthcare is changing. Genomics, digital health, robot-assisted surgery, and many more tools that once seemed like science fiction are now a reality. Because of such unprecedented changes, the healthcare industry is facing a level of disruption that is bringing challenges to every part of the sector and demanding that organizations learn to navigate with new levels of agility and innovation. This article examines the landscape of this disruption and how current and emerging healthcare leaders can navigate it, ensure smooth succession, and maintain a long-term competitive edge.

Generative AI
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Rapid advancements in large language models, such as generative artificial intelligence (AI), offer exciting opportunities to enhance patient care and health equity while lowering costs. This technology can help reduce provider burnout by streamlining time-consuming tasks like writing, editing, searching, and analyzing electronic health records.

According to a recent study of large language models in a healthcare setting conducted at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, these “software tools…have been shown to perform as well or better than humans on many health care-related tasks,” including:

• Updating clinical documentation
• Pulling information from medical records
• “Writing accurate and empathetic responses to patients’ medical questions”

However, despite the enormous potential of large language models to improve patient care, the study identified several obstacles to deploying this technology in healthcare organizations. These included ethical and regulatory challenges as well as the potential for generative AI to provide “incomplete, biased, misleading, or factually false” content. Due to these and other concerns, Dana-Farber Cancer Institute ultimately chose to proceed with using generative AI tools to streamline work and conduct research, but not to provide clinical care.

The authors of the Dana-Farber study share the following best practices for helping leaders integrate this innovative tool into healthcare settings:

• Engage employees in exploring the potential benefits and risks of the new technology
• Create a cross-functional governance body to guide technical, ethical, and policy decisions
• Provide a forum for reviewing employees’ questions and concerns on an ongoing basis
• When the technology is first deployed, provide users with tools to submit software bugs and request features
• Build in stringent data security measures and mechanisms for legal and regulatory compliance (for example, by labeling copyrighted material)

As healthcare leaders navigate unprecedented transformation, their primary goal must be to ensure that emerging technologies like generative AI improve patient outcomes.

Continue reading this article and learn more about the 4 ways to navigate healthcare disruptions. 

Every seat at every table that a woman occupies today exists because someone sat down there first - often uninvited, usually underestimated, always undeterred.

In Raleigh's own history, that story goes back further than most people realize. Born into slavery in Raleigh in 1858, Anna Julia Cooper went on to earn a Ph.D. and write what is considered the first African American feminist publication. Her voice carried further than anyone around her was willing to admit through her writing, education, and her efforts as a founding member and corresponding secretary of the Colored Women’s League. She was doing STEM, and advocacy, before either word existed in its current form.

In 1940, Annie Louise Wilkerson became the first female to complete an internship and residency at Rex Hospital, then went on to become Raleigh's first female OB-GYN specialist and played a defining role in establishing WakeMed. She did it in an era when women becoming doctors was considered, by much of the medical establishment, nearly impossible.

At NC State, statistician Gertrude Cox founded the university's Experimental Statistics department in 1940-41, making it the first such department in the United States. She was instrumental in creating Research Triangle Park itself and became the first woman elected to the International Statistical Institute. The Triangle's identity as a research and innovation hub? She helped lay the groundwork.

In civic life, Isabella Cannon became Raleigh’s first female mayor at age 73 in 1977, and in 2009, Bev Perdue became the first woman ever elected Governor of North Carolina. At the end of her term, Gov. Perdue recalled seeing a little girl at her inauguration wearing a sign that read: 'Wow, maybe I can be a girl governor too.' That is what firsts do. They don't just open a door; they let someone else see the door exists.

​In our legislature, women have served at every level, often as the only woman in the room, shaping policy for a state that didn't always make their path easy. These women didn't have conferences to attend, networks ready to receive them, or pipelines designed to move them forward. They were the pipeline. They were the network. And because of them, the women who came after had something they never did: proof.

Women's History Month is not just about the past. It's about honoring what's changed, what's been built, and what still needs work.

​And look at the Raleigh City Council: for the first time in the city's history, it became majority female. This is a milestone that signals something deeper than symbolic progress; it signals a shift in who is trusted to make decisions about this community's future.

​Here is what every woman on this list has in common: she kept moving when the path was not clear.

That is not a small thing. It is, in fact, the thing. The ability to adapt when conditions are uncertain, to make decisions under pressure without losing yourself, to build momentum that doesn't require permission, that is the skill that built this region and the skill this region still needs.

This is why the message at the heart of our Women's Leadership Conference 2026 presented by PNC feels so true to this moment. Ali Ingersoll, globally recognized speaker, Ms. Wheelchair America, corporate consultant to Fortune 500 companies, and someone who has navigated uncertainty in ways most of us will never face, centers her work on exactly this: leading with grit and grace. Not pretending setbacks don't happen. Not waiting until the road clears. Moving forward anyway, strategically, purposefully, with your humanity intact.

​That's what Women's History Month asks of us. Not just gratitude for how far we have come. But a commitment to making sure the women coming behind us have it better than we did, and that we keep building until that's true.

On March 17, more than 1,000 executives, entrepreneurs, and emerging leaders will gather at the Raleigh Convention Center for Women's Leadership Conference 2026: Amplify Your Influence, the Triangle's most impactful convening for women and allies committed to expanding their reach and driving meaningful change, presented by PNC.

Come for the keynote. Leave with tools you can apply immediately: how to stay calm, think clearly, and lead with influence when the stakes are real. Build connections that last. Walk out with strategies you can use, not just ideas you admire. Women's History Month is about honoring the women who came before us. This conference is about becoming one of the women someone else will honor someday. Join us!