At 16, Mary Messner wanted to be a NICU nurse. She spent spring breaks in California shadowing her aunt and cousin, both neonatal intensive care nurses, attending high-risk deliveries back before HIPAA closed those doors. Then she didn't get into nursing school. That rejection forced a question that shaped the rest of her career: if the real pull was connecting with people and making a difference, what other path could still do that? The answer turned into a 14-year run at Cerner and, eventually, a keynote speaking business built around creativity in the workplace.
What You'll Hear
- Why Mary's North Star was never really nursing, and what she realized when she didn't get into nursing school at KU
- How a grandmother's medical records librarian degree pointed her toward health information management
- Starting at Research Medical Center at 23 as assistant director, then helping lay off half the department a month in
- Marching into the CFO's office to demand the director role after her boss left
- What it was really like inside Cerner consulting, including the work hard, play hard culture seen from a 27 year old's perspective
- How going part time as a new mom turned into a faculty role teaching VA teams to use data and analytics
- The first keynote at Spotlight Analyst Relations in January 2022 and years of coaching that made it feel like a high, not a nightmare
- Why her guiding phrase is simply 'help me think through this'
The dream that didn't survive sophomore year
Mary started where a lot of dreams start: inherited from the people around her. Most of her family worked in healthcare, and she grew up visiting her aunt and cousin in California, both NICU nurses, shadowing them through high-risk deliveries in the days before HIPAA. By the time she got to KU, the plan was clear. She'd knock out her prerequisites, apply to the nursing program at KU Medical Center, and become a NICU nurse.
Then she didn't get in. The program was competitive, she enjoyed the social side of college, and her B average wasn't enough. St. Luke's waitlisted her. KU said not this year. For a 19 or 20 year old whose whole plan hinged on one acceptance letter, that was a small panic moment.
What made the difference wasn't applying again. It was a question she forced herself to sit with: if the actual pull toward nursing was connecting with people and making a real difference in someone's life, what other path could still deliver that emotional payoff? That question, asked honestly at 20, is what moved her toward everything that came next.
Grandmother, medical records, and the pivot into healthcare IT
The answer came from her grandmother. Both of Mary's grandmothers had college degrees, which was unusual for their generation, and one of them had a degree as a medical records librarian. In the pre-technology era that meant literal physical records: pulling charts, filing them, making sure the paper existed where it needed to exist.
When Mary started researching it, the degree had evolved. Medical records librarian had been absorbed into health information management, a broader program that covered not just records but healthcare IT, billing, insurance, and the whole business scaffolding that keeps a hospital running. That wider surface area was exactly what she wanted. She'd always planned to keep growing as a nurse practitioner and beyond. Health information management offered the same kind of open road, just through a business door instead of a clinical one.
She spent a semester at Johnson County Community College loading up on business prerequisites, then went back to KU Medical Center as a health information management student instead of a nursing student. Same building, different future. By the time she graduated in 2004, she'd found her way to a corner of healthcare that let her stay close to patients while learning how hospitals actually work as businesses.
Getting hired for a job she wasn't qualified for
Mary's first job out of college was Assistant Director of Health Information Management at Research Medical Center, an HCA hospital and one of the largest in Kansas City. She was 23, had a degree, and had done a one month internship at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. That was it.
The role had been open for a while, and applicants were thin. Mary walked into the interview with a three ring binder stuffed with notes, org charts, and everything she'd documented during her internship. The message was: maybe I don't have the experience, but here's what I can actually do. They hired her.
A month in, the hospital went through major layoffs. She and her director sat on one side of a conference table for hours, calling in employees one at a time, and Mary cried through most of it. About 40 people out of an 80 person department. She's had to do layoffs since and says the lesson that stuck was to make space for the other person's emotions, not her own. Their world was the one changing. A few months later the director left, Mary marched up to the CFO's office and asked for the job, got told no, sat through a failed search, then marched back up and said, 'I'm all you got.' The CFO gave her the role and micromanaged her appropriately. Mary credits that CFO as one of the strongest role models she ever had.
Fourteen years at Cerner, seen from the inside
After three years running the department at Research, Mary moved to Cerner and stayed 14 years. She went from individual contributor to executive in a few years, traveled full time in the early days, and watched the company through multiple eras, including the years before and after founder Neal Patterson passed away.
Sam asked her about something he'd only seen from the outside as an intern: Cerner's reputation for a heavy drinking culture, especially in engineering. Mary's take, from the consulting side, was that most new hires were 22 or 23, fresh out of college, flown all over the country, paid well, and given per diems. Overnight hospital go lives meant snacks and coffee at 3 a.m. with coworkers who were also your friends. Friday happy hours in the cafeteria. Work hard, play hard as an official motto. For people in that stage of life, it worked. She was 27 when she started, already felt old compared to the rest of the team, and never fully connected with that part of it.
What she did connect with was the appetite for smart risk. Reckless risk got you pushed out. Calculated risk, with homework and the right conversations behind it, got rewarded. That culture is a direct line to what she talks about on stage today.
From stay at home mom to faculty to the stage
Mary's oldest daughter was born in 2014. At six months old, Mary walked into her boss's office ready to quit and be a stay at home mom. Her boss asked if she'd consider part time instead. She said yes, and spent a few years as an individual contributor with the title Special Operations, taking on projects the consulting org needed handled but couldn't prioritize.
After her second daughter was born, she came back full time in a role called faculty. She stood in front of rooms of VA employees and taught them how to use data and analytics to improve veteran outcomes. Her boss at the time, Mike Allison, spent real time coaching her as a public speaker and introduced her to the idea that keynote speaking could be a career. He also introduced her to her first non-Cerner client while she was still on the payroll, a workshop on becoming a trusted advisor. They invited her back. That was the signal.
Her first keynote outside Cerner was Spotlight Analyst Relations in Kansas City, January 2022. By then she'd already been through years of coaching with the faculty team at Cerner, critiquing each other constantly. So when she took the stage the first time on her own, she loved it. Three years in, she's saying no to coffee meetings and networking and blocking entire months on a six foot wall calendar for the events that matter most. The message she's built her business around is creativity in the workplace: giving people permission to think a little differently, and building cultures where that permission is real.
About Mary Messner
Mary is a Kansas City based keynote speaker who talks about creativity in the workplace. She spent her early career in health information management at Research Medical Center, then 14 years at Cerner in consulting, executive, and faculty roles. She launched her keynote speaking business after years of internal coaching at Cerner and delivered her first outside keynote at Spotlight Analyst Relations in January 2022.