Villanova Nursing Welcomes Global Health Strategy and Technology Leader Molly McCarthy as Visiting Professor

The M. Louise Fitzpatrick College of Nursing (FCN) has welcomed Molly K. McCarthy, MBA, BSN, RN-NI, former U.S. Chief Nursing Officer for Microsoft, as its Howley Family Visiting Professor in Healthcare for the 2025-26 academic year. Drawing on her career as a seasoned executive in global health strategy and technology, she is working with FCN faculty, staff and students to build knowledge and activity related to emerging technology and artificial intelligence in health care.

A health technology advisor and strategist to several companies, from early-stage start-ups to global organizations, McCarthy also hosts a podcast, “The Smart Care Team Spotlight,” which highlights and amplifies nursing transformations through technology adoption and change management. She is also a limited partner with Nurse Capital, the only venture fund that solely supports nurse-led start-ups.

McCarthy spent nearly 10 years at Microsoft and led a team of industry, clinical and technical subject matter experts charged with helping health providers and health plans transform with digital technology innovation, most notably Cloud and AI adoption. At Villanova, she will consult with faculty to design and develop innovative course content focused on technology and AI in nursing practice, research and education during her yearlong appointment.

“I want nurses to be better equipped to see the bigger picture of health care and how important what they do every day is—whether it’s in the operating room, at the bedside or wherever their care setting is—and how vital the data and information they’re collecting is to the broader ecosystem,” she said.

Together with the College of Nursing, McCarthy looks forward to working with students and colleagues in engineering and business, for example, promoting cross-pollination among fields for an inclusive, collaborative technology design and development process. She says that narrowing the “gap” between research, education, practice and industry is critical to ideating and solving for challenges in health care.

“How can we expose nurses to more understanding of tech and business so that they’re equipped when they go out into their practice settings, whatever they might be, with a deeper understanding of the bigger picture around tech and how that can empower what they do every day?” she said. “Sustainable and scalable solutions are really going to take a joint effort between educators—above and beyond what we think of today.”

As AI becomes more profoundly integrated in health care, McCarthy recommends that nurses prepare to be a part of the innovation and change process within their care environments. She suggests that they seize the opportunity technology presents to test new concepts and career paths.

“Ultimately, data-informed decision making will lead to improved communication with patients and families and better outcomes for the care they provide,” said McCarthy. “It really takes a partnership between clinicians, engineers, hospitals and IT providers to transform and change the way we approach the problems of health care. Most successful transformations have happened when we have multiple stakeholders at the table. If we can help students learn that and model that for them, they’ll be better off when they graduate.”

McCarthy earned her BSN at Georgetown University, where she was a Division I soccer athlete, and went on to work as a registered nurse in the NICU and as the Pediatric Kidney Transplant Team Coordinator at Stanford Medicine Children’s Health. She transitioned from a clinical role into product marketing at Natus Medical in Silicon Valley when she completed her MBA with a focus in strategic marketing at the University of San Francisco. Prior to joining Microsoft, she worked for Philips’ Patient Care and Clinical Informatics Division and the Association of Women’s Health, Obstetric and Neonatal Nurses.