CIOs at hospitals and health systems have taken on more business and strategic responsibilities in recent years, while their jobs have become less predictable, several of the IT executives told Becker’s.
Becker’s recently asked five CIOs: “What has changed most about the CIO role since you started working in it?”
Note: Their responses have been lightly edited for clarity.
Bobbie Byrne, MD. CIO of Advocate Aurora Health (Downers Grove, Ill.): They used to have CIOs show a three-to-five-year plan that was almost 50 slides long, and CIOs were almost judged on how good they were at predicting the future. This was because the IT industry used to be very predictable. It’s not like that anymore.
And so we’re now trying to develop different skills in our leaders. We need more people who can be flexible and say, “You know, yesterday I thought we were going to go left and today we are going right.”
I now have general plans and trends I observe, but planning a year out is very difficult in this environment. Now I plan our projects for the first six months and then do a six-month check-in to see if these projects are still a priority for our organization.
Ash Goel, MD. Senior Vice President of IT and CIO of Bronson Healthcare (Kalamazoo, Mich.): I think three flavors of change. The first one was simply about the maturity of healthcare technology, and that work was more in the timeframe of 2005 to 2010 when a lot of investments went into healthcare technology. So during that phase, most of the CIOs’ and technology executives’ roles were around implementation of new technologies and bringing both the technical and the application layers of infrastructure up to scale.
Then the next five years was about thinking optimization, which became a buzzword of every single healthcare organization. After we made all the technological investments, CIOs were now looking to improve that investment.
Then fast forward to the next five years. Now, there has been a shift toward the productization and service delivery of solutions, as opposed to applications, technology stack or the optimization of technologies.
Matt MacVey. Executive Vice President and CIO of Children’s National Hospital (District of Columbia): The role of the CIO is rapidly changing from a role with a heavy focus on system-technology deployment to business process and change management, because of the ease in which we can now turn on cloud- or software-as-a-service-based solutions or make changes through coding or low-code approaches.
It used to be we’d have these 12-,18-, 24-month projects. That’s not what we’re focused on today. We can actually turn on capabilities faster than an organization can withstand change in most cases. We’re becoming change agents or change drivers and, along the way, having to engage more deeply in business process to make that change effective.
It’s been building up to this, but I would say in the last couple of years there’s been a dramatic shift. And that also gets CIOs a seat at the table too — particularly if you can do that effectively — because there’s a hunger in most organizations to adapt business process and move faster.
Ellen Pollack, MSN, RN. CIO of UCLA Health (Los Angeles): IT used to be thought of as hardware and infrastructure, and now it is a partner to help achieve business objectives. So it’s just such a completely different landscape. I still have to take care of the infrastructure, but it’s really around helping solve business problems.
Denise Zabawski. CIO of Nationwide Children’s Hospital (Columbus, Ohio): It’s more strategic and more of a business partner.
Source: https://www.beckershospitalreview.com/healthcare-information-technology/cios-working-in-a-completely-different-landscape-in-2022-health-it-leaders-say.html?origin=CIOE&utm_source=CIOE&utm_medium=email&utm_content=newsletter&oly_enc_id=4268I8086634F0A