healthsystemCIO – Strategies for Hospital IT Leaders

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%.

Shannon Becker, VP of IT, Clinical & Revenue Cycle Systems at Sentara Health, explains how business acceleration workshops bring application teams back to the frontline, sort friction into quick fixes and systemic redesigns, and break down silos across business lines.

Errol Weiss, Chief Security Officer at Health-ISAC, discusses threat intelligence, attack-surface reduction and network segmentation, the budget squeeze facing healthcare CISOs, the HICP and HHS Cybersecurity Performance Goals frameworks, third-party and concentration risk, and governing agentic AI as an identity, returning throughout to the people and resources that determine whether a health system can defend itself.

Ramandeep Singh, MD, Associate Chief Health Information Officer and Director of Imaging Informatics at University of Iowa Health Care, breaks down the radiologist shortage equilibrium and the workforce, volume, and reimbursement trends driving it. He details a four-pillar governance model, the scalability case for cloud PACS, an on-prem backup strategy for business continuity, and how his team went live on PACS and dictation in five to six months.

Colleen Mallozzi, MBA, RN, SVP and Chief Nursing Informatics Officer at Jefferson Health, explains why ambient AI documentation succeeds only when nurses help build the rationale, why newer nurses hesitate more than seasoned ones, and how the health system keeps its Abridge and Microsoft Dragon pilots flexible while the nursing ambient market matures.

Craig Richardville, SVP and Chief Digital and Information Officer at UF Health, explains why soft ROI now rivals hard return, how multi-lens governance gates technology spending, and why bringing shadow AI work into a documented sandbox beats blocking it.

Your downtime plan says go to paper. But what if no one on the floor has ever charted that way, and the warehouse ran dry years ago? A CISO explains what resilience really takes. Source: Cyber Resilience Is an Organization-Wide Discipline, Michigan Health’s Sieg Says on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Brian Dilcher, MD, Associate CMIO and Director of Emergency Medicine Clinical Informatics at WVU Medicine, breaks down what he saw at Epic's Agent Factory build-a-thon: token costs that vary wildly between builders, governance that has to run continuously, and the data discipline that keeps fixed-field tools from pulling the wrong information.

John Halamka, MD, president of Mayo Clinic Platform, and Melek Somai, MD, VP and chief technology and product officer at Inception Health, examine why AI-assisted development is reopening the build option for new application requests. They weigh build against buying in-suite or niche, the integration tax that sinks third-party tools, and how abstraction layers and multi-cloud strategy help health systems avoid vendor and LLM lock-in.

Most cyber plans assume your own defenses are the whole battle. McLaren’s Sam Jacques makes the case that survival now turns on how the entire sector moves together when a shared dependency suddenly fails. Source: Resilience Is a Team Sport: McLaren’s Sam Jacques on Operation Vital Signs on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Sahan Fernando, CISO at Rady Children's Hospital-San Diego, explains why understanding hospital operations is the foundation of cyber resilience, covering clinician outreach, executive participation, the IT-operations divide, shadow IT, and downtime planning.

Beth Lindsay-Wood, Chief Informatics and Technology Officer at Moffitt Cancer Center, explains how a breast imaging system that would not scale set off a three-year enterprise imaging consolidation onto one cloud-based platform. She covers how imaging problems surface, getting IT close to operations, governance at the EVP level, streamlining intake as AI floods the request pipeline, and why clean, well-owned data is the foundation for everything that follows.

John Riggi of the American Hospital Association and William Walders of The Joint Commission explain why cyber resilience depends on a single accountable executive, board-level priority, and treating clinical continuity as the mission. They walk through the new Cyber Resilience Readiness program and a 30-day planning benchmark drawn from hundreds of real attacks.

Jason Hill, MD, of Ochsner Health explains how the system treats patient throughput as an end-to-end process, why front-end access matters as much as length of stay, the CMIO-CIO dyad, and how Epic's Cosmos Median Length of Stay tool predicts stays accurately at admission.

Helen Oscislawski, Esq., of Attorneys at Oscislawski LLC, explains what the Epic, Health Gorilla lawsuit means for health system CIOs, why a contract breach differs from an unlawful disclosure, why TEFCA participation remains voluntary, and how to coordinate breach-notification decisions across legal, compliance, and IT.

CISOs Anahi Santiago of ChristianaCare, Krista Arndt of St. Luke’s University Health Network, and Antonio Davis of Northeast Georgia Health System, join Robert Butler from Netskope and healthsystemCIO's Anthony Guerra to examine how to secure AI as it spreads through health systems via shadow tools and vendor upgrades. They argue that visibility, not blocking, lets security permit AI responsibly — pairing governance and guardrails with a culture that coaches users toward sanctioned tools rather than simply saying no.

Ilo Romero, CHCIO, VP and associate CIO at WVU Medicine, explains why HIPAA-compliant frontier AI access now carries a seven-figure entry point, how his model-agnostic platform routes workloads across in-house GPUs and cloud endpoints, and why owning the integration layer beats betting on any single model.

Most leaders treat unsanctioned AI use as a compliance headache to stamp out. Heidi Health’s Simon Kos sees a free market signal hiding in plain sight, one that points straight to the tools your clinicians actually need. Source: Heidi Health’s Kos Says Shadow AI Signals a Tool Gap CIOs Can’t Ignore on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Most EHR selection stories center on platform features. At one rural Indiana hospital, the deciding signals came from outside the platform demos themselves, and from the sponsor relationships that came with one option. Source: Schneck’s Rice: Clinician Scoring, Independence Drove Meditech Expanse Pick Over Epic on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Most patient throughput tools underperform because health systems deploy them too early. A panel of healthcare IT leaders explain the operational disciplines that have to be in place first, and why skipping them costs months of progress. Source: Patient Throughput Improvement Demands Operational Clarity Before Technology on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Most CIOs treat enterprise imaging as a back-burner project. Cincinnati Children’s Towbin lays out the math that changes the conversation, with 90% of healthcare data, 80% workflow gains, and the right champion all in play. Source: Cincinnati Children’s Towbin Says Imaging Is 90% of Medical Data, CIOs Must Lean In on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Most healthcare CISOs handle pen testing and risk assessments routinely. Device inventory and PHI mapping fall into a tougher category, and the new HIPAA Security Rule will soon make both mandatory. Health-ISAC's Phil Englert explains where to focus first. Source: H-ISAC’s Englert Says Device Inventory and PHI Mapping Will Be the Heaviest Lifts When New HIPAA Drops on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Most AI business cases get reduced to a financial spreadsheet. Two veteran health system leaders say clinician satisfaction belongs on the same line, and explain how to find the executive sponsors who will defend it. Source: Health System CIOs: Anecdotal ROI from Key Stakeholders Punches Above Its Weight on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Third-party attacks against health systems jumped from monthly to weekly, outpacing how most cyber programs are built. Inside: how Providence redesigned the CISO role to absorb emergency management and what shifted when the team walked the NICU floor. Source: Providence’s Ratliff Says Merging Cybersecurity and Emergency Management Builds Stronger Cyber Resiliency on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Julia Adler-Milstein, PhD, Chief of UCSF's Division of Clinical Informatics and Digital Transformation, dissects the procurement and integration dynamics steering health systems toward their EHR vendor's in-suite AI tools at the expense of third-party innovators. Drawing on her recent JAMA viewpoint with Sara Murray and Robert Wachter, she explains why market forces alone will not loosen the EHR vendor's grip — and what a policy intervention could realistically look like. Source: UCSF’s Adler-Milstein Says Stay-in-Suite Pull for Clinical AI is Strong, Policy May be Only Way to Level Playing Field on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Ken Kawamoto, MD, Chief Health AI Transformation Officer at University of Utah Health, describes how the AI Workbench lets clinicians build their own AI applications without one-off engineering. The standards-based tool sits inside Epic and uses SMART on FHIR to scale clinical AI across the enterprise. Source: University of Utah Health’s Kawamoto Says Workbench Approach Scales Clinical AI Across the Enterprise on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Most health IT teams assume their SaaS providers built genuine multi-region resiliency. Mass General Brigham’s CTO discovered the truth is less reassuring. The fix starts with one missing habit nobody’s been practicing. Source: Mass General Brigham’s Sriraman Says SaaS Outages Expose Hidden Cloud Dependencies on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Your EHR vendor’s product suite keeps things simple, but simplicity comes at a price. One health system CTO explains why building in-house opened doors he didn’t know existed. Source: Inception Health’s Somai Says Always Staying in Your EHR Suite Limits Differentiation; Building Easier Than Ever on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Panel discussion on EMR optimization with Dr. Hannah Galvin, Dr. Ash Goel, and Dr. Marc Tobias. Source: EMR Optimization: Why Ambient AI Can’t Fix a Broken EHR on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

When clinicians and IT leaders build together from the start, the results speak for themselves. Rush's Associate CMIO shares the partnership playbook behind a handoff tool adopted by 25 health systems and an AI chatbot built in two weekends. Source: Rush University Medical Center’s Rojas Explains How IT & Clinicians Can Truly Partner on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Keith Duemling explains why Catholic Health treats cybersecurity as a chronic condition requiring continuous management rather than an episodic fix. Managing cybersecurity at a health system is less like performing surgery and more like treating diabetes. That is the operating philosophy Keith Duemling, VP/CISO at Catholic Health, brought to his first year leading the security […] Source: Catholic Health’s Keith Duemling: Why Cybersecurity is a Chronic Condition, Not an Episode on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Christina Kochan, Healthcare Solution Architect at CTG, explains why organizing clinical informatics teams by service line instead of by application reveals workflow gaps that product-focused IT structures miss, and how value stream mapping can follow the patient across every handoff, system, and care setting to eliminate friction. Source: CTG’s Kochan Says Patient-Centric Workflow Mapping Exposes Gaps Product-Focused IT Teams Can Miss on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Simon Nazarian explains why City of Hope builds AI governance into the technical foundation to move beyond pilots and ensure safe, scaled clinical care. City of Hope has built a proprietary generative AI platform that converts thousands of pages of patient medical records into actionable clinical summaries in seconds, saving physicians hours of after-hours chart […] Source: City of Hope’s Nazarian Says AI Governance Must Be Built Into the System on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Nurses at HCA Healthcare carry more than 100,000 smartphones on the job every day, part of a decade-long mobile strategy that has fundamentally reshaped how the nation’s largest for-profit health system delivers bedside care. One of the architects of that clinical technology strategy, Sherri Hess, VP/CNIO, says the devices are only as valuable as the […] Source: HCA’s Hess Says Key to Supporting Clinicians and Patients is Staying Connected on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Julie Demaree explains how St. Mary’s Healthcare optimized medication alerts and clinician rounding to earn a solid Leapfrog safety grade on a rural budget. A 130-bed independent hospital in Amsterdam, New York, earned a Leapfrog B safety grade by tackling one of the most daunting challenges in clinical IT: getting medication alerts right. St. Mary’s […] Source: St. Mary’s Demaree Says Small Rural Hospitals Can Achieve Top Safety Grades Without Big Budgets on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Epic is working with a North Dakota health system to build a streamlined implementation model for smaller organizations, a move that could reshape how community hospitals and regional systems access the company’s platform. The collaboration grew out of an unlikely proving ground: a simultaneous Epic and Workday go-live at Trinity Health in Minot, N.D., where […] Source: Trinity Health’s McDaniel Says Epic Considering New Implementation Protocol for Smaller Health Systems; 3rd-Party Pre-Bundling on the Table on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Hospitals will only adopt AI as fast as their least-prepared workers can absorb it: that’s the operating principle behind the AI strategy at one of Ireland’s largest academic medical centers. Dr. Guido Giunti, chief data officer at St. James’s Hospital Dublin, is building his entire digital transformation around a literacy-first model, investing in education and […] Source: St. James Hospital Dublin’s Giunti Says AI Transformation Starts With Literacy on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Penn Medicine’s radiology department has spent nearly seven years building an AI governance process from the ground up, and the biggest lesson has nothing to do with algorithms. It’s about people: engaging stakeholders early, respecting their time, and recognizing that deploying AI in clinical settings demands a fundamentally different approach than rolling out traditional software. […] Source: Penn Medicine’s Cook Says You Can’t ‘Set It and Forget It’ With Clinical AI on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Nebraska Medicine has built and deployed 25 generative AI tools in-house, and its Chief Transformation and Digital Officer says the economics have changed enough that any health system willing to invest in a small data science team can do the same. The Omaha-based academic health system—once among the first to pilot ambient scribes and a […] Source: Nebraska Medicine’s Hasselberg Says Foundation Models Have Leveled the Playing Field for Health System Innovation on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

A 25-bed critical access hospital in southern Colorado just made a bet that Oracle Health’s AI-native EHR will let it punch well above its weight. Mt. San Rafael Hospital and Clinics, based in Trinidad, Colo., signed with Oracle Health in December 2025 after evaluating Oracle, Epic, Meditech, and several other vendors for a new enterprise […] Source: Mt. San Rafael Selects Oracle for EHR Platform; Archuleta Explains Why It’s the Right Move     on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Patient contact centers at health systems handle 40 to 50 times more calls per day than IT service desks/contact centers, yet many organizations still treat them as fixed operational costs with little room for strategic improvement. In this interview from the ViVE conference, part of our Partner Perspective series, CTG’s Joseph Esdale, Strategic Solutions Partner, […] Source: CTG’s Esdale and Kochan say Patient Contact Centers are the Overlooked Frontier for AI Optimization on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Charlie Harp, founder and CEO of Clinical Architecture, explains why healthcare’s data quality shortcomings pose the biggest threat to AI adoption across health systems. In an interview at the ViVE Conference, he describes how decades of clinical data collected as a byproduct of care delivery lacks the precision AI applications demand. Harp shares strategies for building data quality programs that deliver incremental, measurable results. Source: Clinical Architecture’s Harp Says Data Quality Improvement is the Key to Unlocking AI’s Potential on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Dawud Gordon, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Twosense, a Brooklyn-based cybersecurity startup, explains how behavioral biometrics can solve healthcare’s passwordless authentication challenge. In this episode of our Partner Perspective Interview Series recorded at the ViVE conference, Gordon describes why traditional tools like Windows Hello and passkeys fail in clinical environments with shared workstations, and how his company’s software learns to recognize users by typing and mouse patterns. He also shares a nuanced take on where generative AI helps and where it poses serious risk. Source: Twosense’s Gordon Says Behavioral Biometrics Can Finally Crack Healthcare’s Shared Workstation Problem on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Cincinnati Children’s has turned its complication conferences into an innovation pipeline, generating six provisional patents within months by adding one step to a process every hospital already runs: after reviewing what went wrong, ask what solution would have prevented it. Todd Ponsky, MD, chief innovation officer and professor of surgery at Cincinnati Children’s, launched the […] Source: Cincinnati Children’s Ponsky Says Innovation Requires Leaders Who Understand the Upside of Failure on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

A health system in northern Nevada is taking a deliberate approach to AI: fix the data first, and let the intelligence follow. Steven Ramirez, VP and CISO at Renown Health, is leading that charge across cybersecurity, IT governance, and service desk operations, with a strategic plan now in its second year that puts data infrastructure […] Source: Renown Health’s Ramirez Says AI Must Sit on Sound Data Infrastructure on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Dr. Sahil Makhni shares Mayo Clinic’s strategic framework for using AI to eliminate the “administrative tax” on clinicians and solve the root causes of burnout. AI’s workforce impact in health systems starts with how quickly organizations build practical fluency across clinical, operational, and technical teams while keeping governance and training aligned with patient care. Sonya […] Source: Mayo Clinic’s Makhni Says AI Offers Tools to Support The Human Element in Medicine on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Farmers in the Dakotas are logging into endocrinology appointments from the cabs of their combines during harvest season, and the physician on the other end of the screen considers it a point of pride. Dave Newman, MD, Chief Medical Officer of Virtual Care at Sanford Health, oversees a virtual care operation that spans 78 specialties, […] Source: Newman Explains How Sanford Health is Virtually Rewriting the Rural Health Playbook on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Every digital health leader is familiar with the new solution request—often coming from an influential user who believes a tool you do not currently offer is the key to unlocking new efficiencies. Like a toppled domino, that request can set off an intricate process: clarifying what functionality is actually being requested and determining whether it already exists in-house. But the inquiry does not stop there. If the capability is not currently available—and the request is deemed worthy of investment—the next question becomes where to obtain it. Does your EHR vendor offer it? If your core vendor does, is that version good enough, or do you need to pursue a point solution and integrate it into your environment? If so, what would integration require, and what would it cost to build, maintain, and secure over time? In this webinar, we will speak with digital health leaders who have developed disciplined processes to ensure the right factors are weighed at the right time—and by the right stakeholders—so decisions reflect what is best for the organization as a whole. Source: Navigating New Solution Requests: Balancing Cost, Integration, and Innovation on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders

Health First’s 10,000 employees and 600 providers now run on a unified technology backbone that spans hospitals, clinics, and a 100,000-member health plan, and the annual cost is lower than what the organization paid before. The Brevard County, Florida-based integrated delivery network completed two major Epic rollouts in rapid succession: its provider division went live […] Source: Health First’s Carr Weaves Tapestry for Integrated Payer-Provider Platform on healthsystemcio.com - Interviews & Webinars with Health System IT Leaders