Linda J. Knodel, FACHE, is senior vice president and chief nursing officer (CNO) at Mercy, based in Chesterfield, Missouri. Composed of 45 hospitals, 40,000 employees, and more than 2,000 Mercy Clinic physicians, Mercy is the seventh largest Catholic healthcare system in the United States and serves residents in a four-state region.Ms. Knodel was previously vice president and CNO of Mercy Springfield Communities in Springfield, Missouri, and senior vice president and CNO at St. Alexius Medical Center in Bismarck, North Dakota. She has served in various local, regional, and national governance capacities, most recently as president of the American Organization of Nurse Executives (AONE). Ms. Knodel has served on the ACHE Board of Governors, Regents Advisory Council, and Finance Committee. She participated on AONE's strategic planning, membership, bylaws, and annual meeting committees and has served as a regional policy board member for the American Hospital Association. Ms. Knodel currently serves on the Health Professions Program Council with Western Governors University in Salt Lake City, Utah. She has written a book titled Nurse to Nurse: Nursing Management and in 2011 was recognized by the Springfield Business Journal as one of the 12 People You Need to Know.Ms. Knodel is the 2016 recipient of ACHE's Gold Medal Award in the category of healthcare delivery organization. The Gold Medal Award is the highest honor bestowed by ACHE on outstanding leaders who have made significant contributions to the healthcare profession.Dr. Kash: As a nurse leader, how have you worked effectively with both administrators (on the business side) and physicians (on the clinical side) in a large not-for-profit health system ?Ms. Knodel: Two years after finishing nursing school, I was a young nurse working in the dialysis unit of a hospital, and the federal government had put together the End-Stage Renal Disease program, under which Medicare funded treatment for end-stage renal disease. In the mid-1970s, our dialysis unit received $120 per dialysis treatment to care for this patient population. I soon became the department leader and wondered how we could manage the care of these patients for $120 per treatment. We had to come up with a care model under which we provided care for that amount or even less, depending on our ability to negotiate contracts for artificial kidneys, lines, medications, and so forth. That process really intrigued me. I loved the finance side, and the position allowed me to work with our medical director from a practice standpoint to ensure quality patient outcomes, as well as with administration and finance to make sure we were meeting our budget requirements. I thought this was such a healthy model, and that is how I began to grow in the profession.Shortly afterward, our CEO asked me to take over a division that included the quality department, infection control, utilization review, a home care department, and medical records. We were looking at diagnosis-related groups, which was a foreign language to me. That experience prompted me to obtain a bachelor's degree in health administration and then a master's degree in health administration at the University of Minnesota. The education enabled me to bridge my knowledge with administrative and clinical skills.At the same time, the hospital was on the Magnet journey (a designation of the American Nurses Credentialing Center). Just before we submitted our application, the credentialing requirements changed and CNOs needed to have a bachelor's or master's degree in nursing, and I had neither. The local college, which was run by the same order of sisters that owned the hospital, put together a program that allowed 23 other nurse managers and me to receive a master's degree in nursing. About a year and a half later, the hospital achieved Magnet status, the first hospital in North Dakota to do so.Administrators and physicians have to want to work together. …