Rising Stars: A look at five of Munson Healthcare's young leaders, pioneering in their own ways
March 2025
Northern Michigan’s largest healthcare system has thousands of employees across dozens of facilities. While every person on the payroll plays an important role of some sort, those in leadership have the high-pressure task of ensuring that entire departments and operations run smoothly and efficiently.
Among Munson Healthcare’s management are several young people who now lead teams of hundreds of people and have significant responsibility. The TCBN connected with five of these leaders to learn more about how they got there, what they do and their hopes for the decades ahead.
Brendan Franklin, 34
Director of Nursing, Critical Care and Stroke, Munson Medical Center
Franklin started his career with Munson in 2015 as a staff nurse in the emergency department. He rose through the ranks to his current position, which he assumed last year.
In his role, he reports directly to Munson’s chief nursing officer, has seven managers that report to him and about 420 personnel that report to those managers. He has oversight of four clinical departments, including the stroke and intensive care units.
“I deal with everything from patient satisfaction to new equipment needs and collaborating with our physicians,” he said. “In terms of critical care and stroke services, I run daily operations for those programs to align nursing with the needs of our patients.”
After rising through the ranks, he said it’s rewarding to be able to impact more patients and advocate for more staff than he could when he was a front-line worker or managing smaller teams.
“I’ve seen the front lines, middle management and now the director level. I’ve worked at the patient's side, and now I’m working to manage the teams that take care of our patients,” he said. “I have a personal motto – inspire, engage, influence – and this role definitely gives me the opportunity to do so in a much wider net.”
Franklin says staffing is the biggest challenge in his world (as it is across many businesses and organizations in northern Michigan).
“Right now, it comes down to our talent pool – keeping talent in northern Michigan and attracting talent to northern Michigan,” he said. “We’re working every angle we can to make this the best place to work while committing to having the kind, compassionate, caring nursing staff that our patients expect when they come here.”
Being a younger leader isn’t always easy, Franklin says, but he feels that it’s a positive when it comes to recruiting young nurses to his workforce and relating to those who are already there.
“There is something about being younger and being in a more senior leadership level seat, because you can relate to this new generation,” he said. “Obviously (it’s hard) to replace somebody that’s got 40 years of experience in a role, but certainly it’s good to have a balance.”
Looking to the future, Franklin hopes to see an even greater emphasis on improved patient experience. He says that trust in healthcare has faded a little bit in recent years, and improving patient care is the way to regain that trust.
“That could be everything from reimbursement to how care itself is provided. But patient experience has to be number one,” he said. “I'd like to see … our community here really know and trust that we're fully dedicated to providing the services that our patients need in a timely, efficient way.”
He also wants to see more and stronger community partnerships, something that could build trust and help with staffing woes.
“We're very fortunate to have a great connection to NMC here in town, and we should ensure that health care organizations are part of that education process and the growing of the workforce and talent,” he said. “How can we take a health system and get more engaged in some of these community programs that really benefit the health and wellness of our entire community? How can we make sure that Munson's standing there as a partner?”
Aleisha Leusby, 37
Executive Director, Neuroscience, Munson Healthcare
Leusby is in charge of strategic planning and program development for Munson’s neuroscience program (care for the spine, brain and more), which has been a significant area of Munson Healthcare's focus and growth over the past decade.
She rose through the ranks to this position, beginning as an entry-level medical assistant nine years ago, then managing the Grayling Community Health Center and surgical practices in Traverse City before landing in her current role about a year ago.
“I just worked hard and worked my way up,” she said. “One thing I really like about Munson is they really support and grow their own within the leadership ladder, and I think that’s important.”
Assuming leadership at a young age is not always easy, she said.
“As a young professional, you run into barriers every day in terms of gaining that trust – ‘Is she even qualified?’ – but I find breaking down those barriers exciting. My goal has always been to put in the time, work hard and gain that trust and show them that we can build a top-notch program together.”
Leusby says she’s proud of "life-changing" efforts made in recent years to establish northern Michigan’s first comprehensive stroke center, part of a broader and continuing effort to give local residents access to specialty care that previously was only available downstate.
“I really enjoy seeing the positive impact that neurosciences has in our communities. We’ve worked really hard over the last five years to implement our stroke program and neurocritical care … and now we’re able to keep patients in northern Michigan,” she said. “We’re literally saving lives every day, which to me is worth every minute that we put into the work here.”
As with everyone else, staffing shortages are a problem in Leusby’s world. This can have the compound effect of adding even more stress to employees in an already stressful environment, she says.
“It’s really a matter of taking a look at how we can best support the team that we do have and prevent burnout for those individuals,” she said.
She and her team are also navigating financial pressures and increasing costs and balancing the costs of new technology with the benefits it provides.
“How do we continue to grow and provide that high-quality care under the financial pressures that we see within health care today?” she said. “How do we provide the best care for our patients while being good stewards of our financials?”
In the years ahead, Leusby wants to see a greater emphasis on preventative care, something that could – if done right, across the board – ease the tremendous strain on healthcare.
“I think historically it’s always been reactive,” she said. “How do we increase access to screenings or other lifestyle interventions, or community health initiatives, so that we can be proactive?”
Tori Sykes, 29
Director of Nursing, Emergency Services & Operations, Munson Medical Center
Sykes’ primary responsibility is running the nursing team at Munson Medical Center’s emergency department, though she also has oversight of the central transport team and other units. In her role, she has four direct reports and more than 300 indirect reports.
Her story is similar to Franklin’s. She’s been at Munson since 2017, starting in the thick of things as an emergency department nurse. After obtaining her Master of Science in Nursing and MBA degrees, she climbed the ladder to her current position.
After being on the front lines for many years, she enjoys being able to apply her knowledge to the entire department to improve operations. She also feels a great sense of responsibility to lobby her own superiors in an effort to improve working conditions and patient care in her department.
“I really enjoy problem-solving and complex processes. I understand how emergency medicine works, but now I’m getting to make decisions and help influence our senior leaders who are making those big dollar decisions and helping them understand the impact to the patient and ensure we provide the best experience,” she said. “How do we make … the work of the bedside staff much easier?”
Staffing is a challenge in her department, and so is the nature of the work. Working in an emergency department in a small town means there’s no shortage of emotionally draining situations, she says.
“Our community is so small, and obviously there's tragedies in every community. We see bad car accidents, bad snowmobile accidents, bad boating accidents (involving people we know),” Sykes said. “And for an emergency department staff member, that can be really impactful.”
Sykes is excited to see advances in technology that may assist with patient care in the decades ahead.
“The younger generations grew up with cell phones, and we've had the Internet our whole lives. How then do we become the creators of healthcare innovation to make something different?” she said. “What can we do proactively to prevent people from getting sick? And how then do we utilize our ability as a health care system to make that accessible to the patient?”
Chelsea Szafranski, 33
System Director of Digital Health, Munson Healthcare
After several years in administrative roles at Beaumont Health (now Corewell), Szafranski arrived at Munson on the eve of the COVID-19 pandemic in February of 2020.
This timing is particularly noteworthy, as one of her key responsibilities (among many others) is oversight of telehealth and other digital health technologies.
“It was a new role when I started that was really looking at long-term strategy, and when COVID hit, it really accelerated all the work that we were going to do over a few years into just a couple of months,” she said. “I had to hit the ground running.”
Her role is arguably more important than ever as Munson and other healthcare systems are prioritizing increased access by way of telehealth and other technologies.
“A lot of our providers do video visits with patients in their homes … and our emergency medicine providers (use video) to get in contact with specialists or help with patient care,” she said. “I work really closely with a lot of our clinical teams to set up the technology and set up the processes, then make sure they have what they need to be able to do their jobs with digital health work.”
But she’s responsible for much more than just telehealth. She’s charged with discovering and implementing all forms of digital technology that increase efficiency and improve patient care. Online self-scheduling, e-check ins, e-registrations and more are her purview, as are burgeoning technologies that will continue to streamline care and workloads.
“We're also just starting to get into exploring just new technologies and see what's out there, and some of that is artificial intelligence,” she said. “We have a pilot right now where providers are using AI to complete their notes after they see a patient. The technology listens in on the visit with the patient and helps the provider with a lot of the manual work they're doing right now.”
Szafranski says it’s rewarding to explore and implement these tools. Healthcare is just “scratching the surface” when it comes to using new technology that could have tremendous upside, she says.
“I like seeing the impact that technology can have on making our providers more effective in their jobs and letting them focus on the patient care instead of on some of the administrative tasks that they've sort of inherited over the past several years,” she said.
Still, it’s a careful balancing act. New solutions are coming online every month, it seems, and Szafrasnki has to figure out which make the most sense for Munson’s budget, infrastructure and staffing levels.
“There's so much you could do with technology – there really is unlimited potential there. But we only have limited resources and limited time to be able to support (technology),” she said. “So, it's trying to prioritize what can we do given those limited resources. How we make sure that we're focusing on the things that have the biggest impact is one of the main things we struggle with in digital health and just healthcare IT in general.”
Josh Thorington, 40
Director of Outpatient Rehab, Mary Free Bed at Munson Healthcare
Thorington is a physical therapist and board-certified sports clinical specialist who began his career with Munson as a physical therapist at Paul Oliver Memorial Hospital in Frankfort after graduate school.
Now, he oversees outpatient care across several facilities as part of Munson’s partnership with Grand Rapids-based Mary Free Bed. The two organizations joined forces to provide inpatient and outpatient rehab services in northern Michigan.
“I work for two fantastic organizations in Mary Free Bed and Munson Healthcare, with staff that are employed by both or either, but we’re all one big giant team,” he said.
Thorington is driven by the very essence of rehab work. No matter the injury, he and his team are constantly working to make patients better.
“The work we do is so impactful on our communities because we're restoring people's ability to live their lives,” he said. “Whether its an ankle sprain or a stroke, they’ve had a change in their quality of life, and we have the privilege of helping them get their life back, reduce their pain, improve their strength and get them back to doing all the things that are meaningful to them.”
While there’s always a give and take when it comes to moving from the front lines to a position of leadership, Thorington says he feels he’s where he’s meant to be.
“I feel like as a leader, I can impact more lives than I could when I was a clinician,” he said. “I can spread my influence over more people and have more of an impact.”
Thorington is proud of his team and the work they’re doing. It’s great work, he says, and he has the data to back it up. They use an outcome tracking tool that allows them to measure progress against more than 50 million other patients within the system, nationwide.
“(It shows things like) how long the average patient with this injury in this demographic is in therapy for, here’s how much change they typically see in therapy, things like that. So It allows us to benchmark ourselves against a large data set across the nation,” he said. “We’re in the top 15 to 20% of outcomes nationwide. The clinicians we have are so fantastic at the job they do.”
Going forward, Thorington says he wants to see shakeup within the insurance industry, particularly the way they do business.
“Year after year, we keep seeing (insurance companies) decrease the amount they’re paying for outpatient therapy. And if you talk to a lot of our front line staff, they’ll say, ‘I got into this to help people; I never knew that the insurance companies would be the real boss,’” he said. “We want to pay our staff well, we want to reinvest back in our clinics, but when the money you bring in is decreasing year after year, it’s the biggest challenge we have. It’s forced us to maximize how many patients we can care for in a day.”
