healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

Matt Seul, Principal Information Security Architect at Sutter Health, shares lessons from building an AI tool that scans code for security flaws. An initial version produced results in about half an hour; generally stable output took about three months. He explains a file-processing tool call that used about 12,000 tokens with a Python script, the risks of long sessions, and why he uses medium rea...

Sachin Pawar, MD, Surgical Medical Informatics Officer at Froedtert Health, explains why a surgeon with dedicated informatics time can bridge EHR analyst teams organized by application when surgeons work across all of them. Pawar describes how Froedtert moved surgical case entry to surgeons and clinical team members and met its 80% target, and how a surgical governance subcommittee screens request...

Ryan Cameron, EVP, Chief Information & Innovation Officer, Children's Nebraska; Ryan Curl, PhD, AI Governance Lead, SUNY Upstate Medical University; Pete D'Addio, VP of Technology, LCMC Health; and Brian Dilcher, MD, Associate CMIO & Director of Emergency Medicine Clinical Informatics, WVU Medicine, discuss how health systems control AI token costs without asking physicians to count tokens. They c...

Ryan Smith, SVP, Chief Digital & Information Officer at Intermountain Health, discusses the AI triage agents his team began building weeks before Epic go-live. Within about a week, the agents began outperforming a 40-person informatics team in seven or eight application areas, freeing most of the team for at-the-elbow support. Smith explains why clean ticket history, clear ownership and demonstrat...

Kory Hudson, MBA, CHCIO, CIO of Baptist Health Care, discusses the Pensacola, Fla., system's move from Sunrise to Epic, approved in June with go-live planned for 2028. Hudson explains why a late start lets Baptist build on Epic's standard content and go live on the newest release, how patient-centered guiding principles will decide which specialty systems stay outside Epic, and why he expects to s...

Chuck Christian, VP of Technology/CTO at Franciscan Health, discusses why the cost controls health systems built for the cloud do not extend to AI. He describes the Cloud Cost Analyst role he created in 2023, the weekly report it produces, and a workload move projected to save about $50,000 a month. He also covers chargeback, token metering, and what happens when outside agents start querying heal...

Matthew Kull, EVP, Chief Information and Digital Officer at Inova Health, discusses why walling scheduling data off from large language models costs health systems appointments. He reports API calls from ChatGPT into Inova's Epic environment have skyrocketed, warns peers to expect a 10X jump in API fees, and explains the autonomy line separating Inova's agentic call center, now handling 400,000 ca...

Chris Tyberg, chief information security officer at Abbott and chair of the Health Sector Coordinating Council Cybersecurity Working Group, explains why polling application owners produces unusable downtime plans and what business process owners answer instead. He shares early findings from Operation Vital Signs, the first sector-wide healthcare cyber tabletop, including why sustained response str...

Hugo Lai, Chief Information Security Officer at Temple Health – Temple University Health System, discusses why frontier AI collapsed the 30-day patch window and what changes when defense has to run at machine speed. He details the limits and monitoring every defensive agent needs, the security point of contact missing from most business associate agreements, and why a major outage reaches the C-su...

Stephen O'Mahony, MD, SVP and Chief Medical Information Officer at RWJBarnabas Health, discusses the clinical adoption work behind an AI deterioration warning tied to an 18% reduction in the risk-adjusted odds of in-hospital death. He details the concept-to-data mapping done with the technical team, the suppression logic that keeps the system quiet when clinicians already know, and the silent back...

Tinu Tadese, MD, System VP/CMIO at Boston Medical Center Health System, discusses Project Unite, the six-month integration that brought two former Steward Health Care hospitals onto a mature Epic build. She explains the MVP+ approach that lifted an academic build into community settings, the day-one data decisions that kept patients safe, and why conversion time is the constraint an acquisition ti...

Julie Demaree, VP, Chief Technology and Digital Innovation Officer at St. Mary's Healthcare, Corey Zeigler, CIO at Helio Health, and Carrie Weigand, MD, clinical advisor at Heidi Health, discuss how a lean IT department gets ambient AI into clinicians' hands. They cover buying at-the-elbow support instead of staffing it, the customization decisions that break vendor alignment, peer champions as th...

Chris Paravate, EVP and chief digital and information officer at Northeast Georgia Health System, discusses the five-week rollout of Epic’s Chart with Art to nurses and patient care techs at five hospitals. He explains why a tool that fails safely earns a lighter implementation, how 88% adoption in 30 days replaced a business case for the AI shift-handoff summary, and where operations must set the...

Cassie Marcelle, VP of clinical informatics and CNIO at UF Health, Marc Perkins-Carrillo, CNIO at Moffitt Cancer Center, and Lisa Stephenson, CNIO at Cedars-Sinai, discuss why ambient AI built for physician notes cannot simply be pointed at nursing flowsheets. They cover device platform gaps, nurses who use discrete fields as a checklist, super user programs with paid training hours, and governanc...

J.D. Whitlock, CIO at Dayton Children's Hospital, breaks down the ambient AI decision waiting at the end of his Abridge contract and the test Epic's Chart with Art will have to pass. He explains why nursing ambient means a second vendor and a second bake-off, what reported take-private talks at Workday would do to the EpicOps timeline, and how 20 clinical governance committees keep the call out of...

Allison Dempsey, PhD, PMH-C, Director of Technology and Data Governance at the Brain and Behavior Innovation Center at CU Anschutz, discusses why behavioral health met AI’s consent and privacy questions before the rest of the enterprise. She explains the response cost test she applies to every technology request, how Colorado’s new psychotherapy AI law added a mid-session consent step to ambient d...

Shauna Overgaard, PhD, Senior Director of AI Strategy and Frameworks at Mayo Clinic, discusses an emerging approach that tests selected AI tools in the simulation center, with standardized patients, before clinical use. She describes the workflow shadowing that changed how Mayo's review board weighs proposals, the exploratory work on bringing clinicians into evaluation, and a reliability cue in de...

Susan Harkness Regli, PhD, Associate CHIO for Human-Computer Interaction at the University of Pennsylvania Health System, discusses how human factors work protects clinicians from AI tools that pass technical testing yet fail at the screen. She details Penn's staged alpha and beta exposure, the usage data that caught one role accepting AI-drafted patient replies unedited, and why governance approv...

Darin Prill, MBA, CHCIO, VP/CTO at WellSpan Health, discusses the 17-week migration that moved more than 300 applications and the full Epic environment to AWS ahead of a Broadcom renewal. He details the wave schedule that held Epic downtime to about two hours, the intake review deciding which third-party tools travel with Epic, and the data work that has to precede AI.

Ilo Romero, VP/Associate CIO at WVU Medicine; Pam Austin, former SVP/CIO at Ballad Health; and Guido Giunti, MD, PhD, Chief Data Officer at St. James's Hospital Dublin, examine why AI literacy programs stall when IT owns them alone. They make the case that operational and clinical leaders hold the trust adoption depends on, and offer a role-based, federated model for building workforce capability...

Terri Couts, SVP and Chief Information and Digital Officer at Sharp HealthCare, walks through the governance restructuring that opened her first year in San Diego. She covers moving decision authority out of advisory committees, tracking analyst time against task to build a capacity heat map, and why application load and rounding belong in the same foundation conversation.

Elias Kikano, MD, Division Chief for Imaging Informatics and Medical Director for Health Informatics at Emory, discusses the new healthcare security baseline for Apple devices developed with NIST and Apple. He covers how the mapping connects Apple control points to HHS Health Industry Cybersecurity Practices guidance, what security teams can pull into mobile device management, Emory's Apple deploy...

J. Scott Smitherman, MD, MBA, VP/CMIO at Providence, walks through Project Pixel, the internal effort to evaluate Epic’s AI portfolio. He covers the safety standard and time-savings test every release must pass, why fully loaded cost governs both native and third-party requests, how service-line governance works across 50-plus hospitals, and why clinicians deserve to hear what their request would...

Jim Blum, MD, CHIO at University of Iowa Health Care, explains why deep integration with the clinical record led his team to adopt Epic's EpicOps Teamwork scheduling module as an early adopter, how a single source of truth advanced patient safety, and why aligning ERP and clinical data could reshape total-cost-of-care analytics.

Zafar Chaudry, MD, former Chief Digital Officer at Seattle Children's, and Adar Palis, SVP of Clinical & Revenue Cycle Applications at Providence, examine why health systems struggle to retire the applications they no longer need. They explain why usage counts mislead, how legacy tools widen the cybersecurity attack surface, and why a 20% reduction target often ends the fiscal year closer to 5%.