Grace Bourke, Consulting Director, Baker Tilly: The Problem Isn't the Technology

From People Solve Problems by Jamie Flinchbaugh

April 1, 2026 · 22 min

About this episode

Grace Bourke discusses the challenges organizations face with technology implementations and the importance of understanding underlying problems.

Grace Bourke, Consulting Director at Baker Tilly, has spent nearly four decades working at the intersection of healthcare, quality improvement, and technology. She joins Jamie Flinchbaugh in this episode of People Solve Problems. She shares what she has learned about why technology implementations so often go wrong, and what organizations can do to get ahead of the problems before they take hold. Grace opens with a fundamental challenge: organizations frequently deploy technology without fully understanding the problem they are trying to solve. At Sutter Health, she saw teams convinced that a new electronic health record system would resolve issues that were actually rooted in communication gaps and unclear standard work. The danger, she explains, is that technology does not eliminate underlying problems. It simply makes the mistakes happen faster and harder to trace once they are buried in a database. To address this, Grace uses an approach she calls Gap-IT , a structured gap analysis that maps how work is currently done against how it will function in the new system. In one example involving a Pacific Northwest health system undergoing an ERP reimplementation, the process…

People in this episode

Host: Jamie Flinchbaugh

Guest: Grace Bourke

Topics covered

technology implementation
healthcare
quality improvement
gap analysis
organizational challenges

Keywords

technology
healthcare
quality improvement
gap analysis
electronic health record
process stability

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Baker Tilly, Sutter Health, Pacific Northwest health system