Registered Nurse. Healthcare Operations Leader. Founder of PULSE Advisory.
Her career began in 2013 as a New Graduate nurse at UC San Diego Health, hired in the middle of a nursing shortage. She floated across Medical-Surgical and Telemetry units at Thornton Hospital, Jacobs Medical Center, Hillcrest Medical Center, and the Sulpizio Cardiovascular Center.
At Rady Children’s Physician Management Services, she worked as a float nurse, giving influenza vaccinations to pediatric patients.
She held patients' hands when the news was hard. She sat with families through the longest nights of their lives. She was the calm in a room full of uncertainty.
Those nights made one thing clear. Care is personal. Every patient deserves a nurse with the time, the support, and the clarity to give their best.
In time, she saw what makes those moments possible. The staffing. The training. The workflows. The supplies and the technology. Every decision made away from the bedside shapes what happens at it.
So she followed care upstream. She led medical operations. She built and scaled nursing departments. She partnered with physicians launching their own practices. She served as a Director of Nursing.
Every role proved the same truth. Quality care starts behind the scenes.
That is why she founded PULSE Advisory. RN-founded healthcare operations advisory for private medical practices, concierge medicine, and medical wellness. Every engagement begins with The PULSE Assessment, alongside leadership and the front line. From there, PULSE designs the systems behind the delivery of care, with compliance built in, and stays through integration. Ongoing Advisory continues as the practice evolves.
The result is a practice built to operate.
Launching a practice, evolving one, or ready for the business side to match the care you already deliver? Let's connect.
Leigh Ann spent years at UC San Diego Health, inside the pace of real practice, watching excellent providers and healthcare workers carry strong systems.
Director of Nursing at a startup treatment center. Built the nursing department from a blank slate, ran medical operations, and learned firsthand what makes a system hold.
The two disciplines rarely speak. PULSE Advisory was created to bring them together, and to design systems that operate.
Defined roles. Structured workflows. Clear escalation paths. Infrastructure that held whether it was Tuesday morning or Saturday at 3 AM. That experience set the bar.
It also taught her something she still carries: symptoms are signals, not the cause. Look past what is visible.
If performance depends on who is working,
it is not a system.
Work was sustainable. Work and life balance was achievable. People stayed.
A clean record across regulatory audits, built into daily operations.
Accreditation as a byproduct of how the organization ran.
I worked alongside Leigh Ann clinically, and her range is what stands out. She is a strong nurse first, and she builds the systems around the clinical work so the team can actually do its job. She knows the regulatory side deeply and teaches it, so compliance becomes something the team grows into instead of something handed down. She advocates for patients and for staff in the same breath, and nothing she builds depends on her being in the room.
Sammi Montag, RDBehavioral Health Treatment Center · Escondido
Leigh Ann designs the systems healthcare organizations need to operate. Staffing models that reflect real census patterns and safe ratios. Onboarding that does not depend on one person's knowledge. Documentation and workflows that support patient care and operational visibility.
Medical and nursing workflows, built by someone who has used them.
Advisory for executive leadership, medical directors, and physicians on how care translates to the floor. Time goes to patients, not to friction.
Well-designed workflows change the way healthcare is delivered. That change reaches patients, staff and profits.