healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

AI is being infused into the healthcare ecosystem from 1,000 directions at 100 miles per hour. At least, that’s what it feels like to many tasked with ensuring those injections are done with proper guardrails in place. And while the risks of drift, hallucinations, and bias are at least well appreciated (if not mastered), those related to compliance and cybersecurity need to be more deeply consider...

Healthcare IT executives are deploying technologies such as generative AI to improve front-end patient access, enable ambient clinical documentation, and streamline back-office tasks like claims submission. Yet the mid-revenue cycle often receives less attention. This broad domain—including clinical documentation integrity and physician query management, medical coding and clinical validation, and...

Nnaemeka Okafor, MD, VP, Chief Analytics and Informatics Officer, Memorial Hermann Health System, says health systems are shifting from purchasing tools to building the conditions that let them deliver results. In an extensive interview, he outlined a program that emphasizes multidisciplinary governance, deliberate training, durable data infrastructure and careful budgeting that accounts for the t...

Robbie Freeman, Chief Digital Transformation Officer, Mount Sinai Health System, is steering a consolidated digital-and-AI agenda that aims to simplify experiences for patients, clinicians, and a 48,000-person workforce, while tightening the link between experimentation and enterprise scale. In a wide-ranging discussion, he outlined a governance model that blends top-down priorities with bottom-up...

Mouneer Odeh, VP, Chief Data and AI Officer, Cedars-Sinai, is positioning the organization to harness fast-maturing AI while keeping clinical workflow, governance, and scale at the center of decision-making. In a wide-ranging discussion, he traced his path from advanced analytics to enterprise AI, outlined the role of platform vendors versus best-of-breed tools and internal builds, […] Source: Ced...

Chero Goswami discusses how Providence uses a relationship-first philosophy and front-line rounding to ensure innovation drives real patient impact. Chero Goswami, Chief Information & Digital Officer, Providence, is using front line observation, disciplined governance and renewed business-continuity planning to align technology with clinical reality across the seven-state system. In a recent inter...

Rady Children’s Health is consolidating analytics and AI-enabling services on a governed cloud platform to reduce friction for clinical, operational, and financial users. Caroline Peika, Director, Integration & Analytics, said the program pairs a centralized data environment with a private retrieval-augmented generation chatbot to turn internal documents into reliable answers with citations. The a...

Pallavi Ranade-Kharkar, PhD, Enterprise Director of Research Informatics and Genomics, Intermountain Health, laid out a disciplined approach to AI adoption that balances rising organizational pressure with patient-centered guardrails, emphasizing governance, security, and measurable value for clinicians and consumers. Health systems are under strain to automate, improve access, and lower costs. Na...

Chuck Podesta, CIO, Renown Health, is steering his organization toward an interoperability model that leans on AI “orchestration” rather than large, centralized data repositories—while pairing that shift with tougher data governance and a stronger resilience posture. The three-hospital system in Reno, Nev., which includes an 800-bed regional facility, a community hospital, a children’s hospital an...

Melek Somai, MD, MPH, VP, Chief Technology & Product Officer, Inception Health – the innovation arm of ThedaCare-Froedtert Health, argues that healthcare’s cost and access pressures cannot be solved by staffing alone; they require technology-led redesign of how care is delivered. In a wide-ranging interview, he described why his organization is putting technology at the […] Source: Inception’s Som...

James Case, VP/CISO, Baptist Health, frames his program around a single theme: balance. Case seeks to harden the enterprise against modern threats while protecting the speed and reliability clinicians require to deliver care. He argues that the test of any control is whether it reduces material risk without creating unnecessary friction at the bedside, in […] Source: Baptist’s Case Says CISO Role...

Adnan Hamid, VP/Regional CIO, CommonSpirit Health, says the next phase of “transforming care through innovation” begins with financial realism: health systems must preserve access for communities while confronting persistent cost pressure. In California, he helps support nearly 30 hospitals and more than 600 clinics inside one of the nation’s largest faith-based systems serving many underserved […...

Priti Patel, MD, CMIO, John Muir Health, is steering a measured expansion of AI from long-running predictive models to newer generative tools, pairing administrative relief with cautious governance and education for clinicians and patients. Under her direction, the system has deployed ambient scribing across ambulatory practices and is extending that footprint to inpatient and emergency […] Source...

At Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, Epic-integrated AI continues to do what humans rarely can at the tail end of long patient visits: captures every detail, improves coding accuracy, and eases the documentation burden. Greg Lawton, MD, EHR Medical Director – CHOP Primary Care, Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, describes a measured path to deploying generative AI […] Source: CHOP’s Lawton Sa...

Amid an era of exuberance around AI, John Halamka, MD, President, Mayo Clinic Platform, notes that the apparent “suddenness” of its appearance masks a long arc of work. “This is a overnight revolution, 50 years in the making,” he said, noting that today’s breakthroughs rest on decades of progress in compute, storage, and tooling—combined with […] Source: Mayo’s Halamka Advises Matching Degree of A...

Kerry Bommarito, PhD, VP, Enterprise AI and Decision Intelligence, Mercy, says the health system’s AI agenda begins with the enterprise plan, not shiny tools. After the executive team sets five organization-wide OKRs each fiscal year, work streams cascade to accountable leaders; Bommarito is a trustee on a key result aimed at revenue-cycle improvements through automation […] Source: Mercy’s AI Lea...

Michael Weiss, MD, Associate CMIO, Memorial Healthcare System; and Assistant Medical Director Pediatric Emergency Medicine Joe Dimaggio Children’s Hospital, is leading a push to curb idiosyncratic documentation that can undermine quality, compliance, and the value of emerging AI. In a wide-ranging discussion, he described a “Rogue Note” campaign that preserves clinician flexibility but insists tha...

Health systems that have implemented ambient AI technology often face a familiar challenge: ensuring consistent adoption and maximizing its value across diverse clinical roles. This webinar will examine strategies IT leaders can use to assess, measure, and improve ambient AI utilization, from high-level workforce analytics to role-specific and individual provider engagement. Panelists will discuss...

In a wide-ranging interview, John Lee, MD, Emergency Physician, Edward Hospital Naperville; Informaticist, & Epic Consultant, outlined a disciplined approach to getting more value from Epic while preparing for an AI-enabled future. He emphasized that health systems are still leaving significant capability untapped, urged CIOs to define firm boundaries for customization, and described how consolida...

Eric Poon, MD, MPH, Chief Health Information Officer, Duke University Health System, described how the organization is moving AI from scattered experiments to an operating discipline aligned with enterprise strategy. Poon outlined a single intake for technology decisions with added lifecycle oversight when AI is involved, and a bias toward evidence-based scaling. He said the […] Source: Duke Healt...

Early vendor engagements can set the trajectory for years. This session examines how health systems should structure first steps with startups and other vendors—clarifying data-sharing parameters, defining realistic timelines, and establishing criteria for expansion or termination. Panelists will detail how to frame success metrics that both parties can measure, align governance and decision right...

Effective IT training is a critical, yet often underappreciated, factor in health system performance. This webinar will examine how information technology executives can oversee and coordinate training for new hires, existing staff learning upgraded applications, and high-level users requiring advanced support. Panelists will discuss strategies for balancing the roles of IT, informatics, HR, vendo...

Peter Pronovost, MD, PhD, Chief Clinical Transformation Officer, University Hospitals, is advancing a system-wide push to improve quality while reducing burden and cost. In a recent discussion with healthsystemCIO, he detailed a multi-year effort to reach “zero harm, zero suffering, zero waste, and zero inequities,” described a whole-hospital remote care platform now operating at Lake […] Source:...

Deepti Pandita, MD, CMIO & VP of Clinical Informatics, UCI Health, thinks that the fastest path to value with AI is to stop treating it as a side project and weave it directly into existing operational priorities. “AI should be embedded into whatever your strategic projects are or whatever problems are being solved at the […] Source: Embedding AI Where It Matters: UCI Health’s Pandita on Governanc...

Morgan Jeffries, MD, Medical Director for AI at Geisinger and his colleagues, are reshaping how a large integrated health system organizes, oversees, and educates around AI — moving from a small, model-building shop to a cross-functional product organization with formal risk review and a rising emphasis on workforce literacy for AI tools. Within Geisinger’s AI […] Source: Geisinger Refines AI Gove...