
A pediatric nurse became a lawyer, an operator and, eventually, a chief executive. Across every reinvention, Karen Walker Johnson kept the same instrument close: the discipline of listening before designing the answer.
Kathy Wallace is the CEO of LifeCare Hospital of Plano, part of LifeCare Hospitals of North Texas. A registered nurse with roughly 35 years in healthcare and about 18 of them at LifeCare, she rose through clinical and executive roles into the corner office. She is one of an all-female group of CEOs, all trained in critical care, who lead LifeCare's North Texas long-term acute care hospitals. Her focus is on early-intervention and mobilization protocols that shorten recovery times for the most fragile, critically ill patients while cutting readmissions.
Ilana Borkenstein is the co-founder and CEO of M7 Health, a New York healthtech company building nurse staffing and scheduling software designed by the people who live the night shift. A registered nurse who worked a bone marrow transplant unit at Memorial Sloan Kettering - the literal M7 floor the company is named for - she turned a Harvard Business School class project into a platform now used daily by tens of thousands of clinicians across more than 60 hospitals. M7 has raised about $17 million, including a $10 million Series A led by Threshold Ventures, on a single idea: fix nurse scheduling not as a math problem but as a human one.