Diane Drexler is the Chief Nursing Officer for Banner Estrella Medical Center, which is Banner Health's newest facility located in West Phoenix. Banner Estrella Medical Center (BEMC) opened in January 2005 as the "hospital for the future", employing advanced information technology, including computerized physician order entry in a community healthcare setting. Banner Estrella is a 172-bed facility which has been the first of Banner's facilities to implement Care Transformation. Care Transformation is a Banner wide initiative which combines the implementation of enabling technology with applied clinical work redesign, cultural change management and the application of appropriate clinical knowledge and content. Additionally, BEMC embraced the journey of transforming existing patient care delivery processes using principles of evidence-based practice and evidence-based design to guide the work and necessarily improve operational productivity.

"As we were getting ready to open up this facility, one of the questions asked by the community was how are you going to staff a new 170-bed hospital with this acute nursing care shortage when we cannot staff the current hospital in the community. I realized that I had a once in a lifetime opportunity to start from scratch; so I looked at local resources. LPNs were the first thing that came to my mind, as there was a local community college in our backyard with an LPN program."

"Being willing to make a mid-course correction and recognizing when something is not working as intended. We needed to be willing to step back and say what do we need to do to make this model work. That can be difficult when all eyes are on you, but as a leader, you need to be able to do the right thing for the right reasons."