Two nurses who spent their careers at the bedside. One now leading a children’s hospital. One who left the bedside to build something patients needed at 2am that no one else had built yet. Both asking the same question: how do we make this better for the people who need it most?
The Easy Button for Family Care: Courtnay Caufield on Nursing, Technology, and the Whole Journey
Courtnay Caufield has spent her career moving through some of the most complex environments in healthcare, community hospitals, academic medical centers, integrated health systems. Now, as the new Chief Nursing Officer at Miller Children’s and Women’s Hospital in Long Beach, her hometown hospital, as she describes it, she’s thinking about the family healthcare journey as a single, continuous story.
“One size doesn’t fit all,” she says. From neonatal care through adolescence and into adulthood, the needs change, but the family stays the same. Her goal: make the healthcare system feel like it knows that.
She points to the cognitive overload that comes with fragmented care. Open your health app and you might find five referrals, three letters, three appointments, and a vaccine schedule, all competing for two minutes of attention from someone also managing a household.
“Just tell me what to do. Give me a schedule and the why.”
Technology, she believes, can do that, but only if health systems commit to building it around the patient’s daily reality, not the system’s convenience.
On innovation, she’s most excited by what happens when nurses themselves drive the agenda. Wearables that translate vital signs in real time. Ambient documentation tools that ease the burden of charting. Smartwatches that track glucose and cardiac rhythms, and clinical staff who understand them well enough to help families take that data home. “Nurses are innovators. If we feed that and fuel that, they’ll tell us what’s important.”
The barriers she names are honest ones: financial pressure, competing priorities, and a persistent tendency to treat AI tools as “nice to haves.” The shift, she argues, is in how you make the case, not just for patients, but for leadership: this isn’t a luxury. It’s how we care for more people, better.
Real Dogs. Real Comfort. Michele Davey and the Story Behind Murphy Cares
Michele Davey spent 26 years in hospitals. She worked in the cardiac ICU, the OR, fetal surgery, and trauma. She had seen nearly everything, and she kept coming home to her dog.
“She was always there for me,” Davey says. “I wanted to share that with other people.”
That instinct became Murphy Cares, the first digital pet therapy app, built around real dogs, real interactions, and a simple premise: when a child is anxious in a hospital at 2am, there should be something that helps.
The path from idea to product was longer than she expected. She left her job. She spent her own savings. She learned through early prototyping that FaceTime-with-a-dog doesn’t work, time zones, HIPAA, and the fact that dogs respond to silhouettes, not moving targets on a screen. So she rebuilt. Multiple prototypes. App store launch. QR codes in emergency rooms. A pivot to a progressive web app when patients couldn’t remember their passwords.
Then the results started coming in. A community hospital ER pilot, designed to ease the stress of long waits, organically spread to the hospital floors without being pushed there. A research study at Penn Presbyterian, the largest adult trauma ER in Philadelphia, found that not just patients, but caregivers and clinicians were all using it. The app is now hospital-wide there.
Davey is deliberate about one thing: “These are real dogs. There is no AI dog in this.” In an era when that distinction needs saying out loud, she says it with conviction. Real animals. Real barks. Real comfort. “People have real feelings that we’re trying to help.”
Murphy Cares is expanding, more hospitals, more animals, ongoing research studies. The mission stays simple: give anyone, anywhere, at any hour, something that makes them feel a little less alone.
Key Topics Discussed:
- Integrated maternal and pediatric care under one roof
- Technology as a navigation tool for families managing complex care journeys
- Nurses as frontline innovators, and what it takes for health systems to support them
- Barriers to AI adoption: from “nice to have” to clinical necessity
- Building Murphy Cares: from prototype to research to hospital-wide deployment
- Real dogs as the foundation of digital pet therapy, and why that matters
About Courtnay Caufield:
Doctorally prepared nurse executive with more than 20 years of progressive leadership experience across community hospitals, academic medical centers, integrated health systems, and specialty women’s and children’s healthcare organizations.
Recognized for building high-performing teams, advancing professional nursing practice, and leading transformational initiatives that improve quality, safety, workforce engagement, and patient outcomes. Expertise includes nursing operations, clinical informatics, professional practice, quality and performance improvement, innovation, and women’s and children’s services.
Passionate about developing future nurse leaders, fostering cultures of excellence, and leveraging technology and innovation to enhance care delivery. A collaborative and servant-minded leader committed to advancing healthcare through strategic vision, operational excellence, and compassionate, patient-centered care.
About Michele Davey:
Michele Davey is a nurse innovator, entrepreneur, and founder of a digital pet therapy company, who has formerly practiced clinical nursing for over 27 years at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia (CHOP). Michele is an extraordinary patient advocate with a strong passion in clinical bedside nursing and patient care. With years of experience and her creative mind, Michele’s early innovation included acquiring a patent, developing an IV safety product and implementing the new product into patient care while in the role of nurse innovator. This experience led her to envision and pursue many other novel ideas. In her innovator role, Michele mentored nurses through the innovation process in all capacities and levels to acquire knowledge from concept viability to research and development through to roll-outs. Michele recognized the intense amount of stress and anxiety her patients were experiencing in the overall healthcare setting. While she greatly valued the proven outcomes of pet therapy, she recognized that pets were limited to a few patients at a time, and the need was far greater. She used her own advice and guidance to create a digital pet therapy platform for patients to decrease anxiety and stress during healthcare encounters. Inspired by her mother, a nurse of 35 years, Michele chose the same path, receiving a Diploma in Nursing from St. Luke’s School of Nursing in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. After graduating, Michele began her career at the Cardiac ICU at CHOP where she eventually transitioned to the Operating Room. She flourished in the peri-op environment and was drawn to the innovative care emerging in this field and in her role of leading the Fetal Surgery Specialty Nurse team. Michele also worked on the surgical and medical units performing direct clinical care. Throughout her career, Michele has spoken at numerous National conferences and served on panels in both the field of fetal surgery and nurse innovation. She has won multiple innovation awards and accolades, as a pioneer in the innovation space. Her empathy for patients and contagious spirit energizes those around her to participate in her mission to improve the overall patient experience and create a positive environment. In this spirit, Michele independently founded Murphy Cares, a digital pet therapy platform to impact the quality of the patient experience. Michele’s vision is to provide digital pet therapy to patients across all practice settings, as she has seen the many positive benefits and intends to spread them nationally. Murphy Cares is the first of its kind in this digital therapeutic pet therapy space.
Michele is not afraid to take the risk of creating something that has never been done before. She is a Changemaker. Michele is known to be big-hearted and her passion to help others is exhilarating.
