The following is guest article by Mark VanderKlipp, Senior Consultant at TiER1 Healthcare.
On September 22, Healthcare IT Today hosted a virtual panel of dynamic and inspiring former Healthcare CIOs who shared lessons learned, career secrets, and advice for current IT leaders. Moderated by Founder and Chief Editor of HealthcareScene.com John Lynn, the panel included Former CIO at MHS, and Brigham and Women’s Hospital Sue Schade; Former CIO at Scripps Health, Seattle Children’s, and Steward Healthcare, Drex Deford; Former CIO at Mayo Clinic, Christi Heath, and MaineHealth Abdul Bengali; and Former CIO at Intermountain Marc Probst. TiER1 Healthcare sponsored the panel and participated in virtual table discussions with attendees.
Each panelist lives up to the billing of “Former CIO,” even though they are still well connected and, as we learned over the course of the conversation, have several past professional postings in common. When asked what they feel they can say now as opposed to when they were occupying those positions, they noted the reality of an “interim” posting: the expectation is that you are going to bring all your expertise, including perspective gained from past experiences, and tell it like it is. Rather than tempering your responses to maintain your position, they suggest embracing the role and the imperative to “tell them their baby is ugly.” They encourage all CIOs—employed or interim—to speak up assertively and continually grow in their role.
One way that’s done is by focusing on your changing role as CIO. There was an era where healthcare followed a fee-for-service model, so the CIO had a different mindset, requiring different skillsets focused on technology and reliability, which the panelists referred to frequently as “making sure the trains run on time.” Now that healthcare is transitioning to a pay-for-value structure, the mindset needs to shift: to be transformational and innovative, to be a business partner to our peers in the C-Suite.
The most critical part of this transition is to establish a good governance process. Prioritization is a challenge in healthcare because we are mission-focused—as CIOs we all want to do the right thing and say “yes” all the time. We must establish a well-structured governance process to manage limited resources. If we don’t do this, we’re doing a disservice to our organization, our patients and their families, and our internal team because we set unrealistic expectations. If at the outset we focus alignment on governance, many of the challenges we encounter will be less problematic.
This is so critical because governance is all about people outside of IT governing the function’s priorities. It is typically difficult to pull physicians into this role, because our world is a black box to them. What can we do to make our world more of a white box to our peers? The answer is transparency: how we do the math about project costs, resources, contracting, and more. The more transparent we can be, the fewer potential pitfalls in governance. If we focus on building trust through transparency, we’re typically given a lot more leeway to do what needs to be done. This is when the job becomes fun.
“If you don’t have good governance, your peers will go off on a different path with their own ideas of what the strategic plan means; they’ll want you to come along on that ride with them, and if you do, they’ll pull you out into the middle of the lake and drown you.” – Drex Deford
IT also needs to be in alignment with the organization’s strategic objectives. As an IT function, you can suffer “death by a thousand cuts” by losing focus on those objectives; resources need to be available for the bigger initiatives that align with the overall plan. Our job is to make sure our CEOs stop looking at us through a traditional lens, seeing us first as business leaders who happen to have an assignment of technology. This “double major” can bring significant transformation to the organization. Positioning yourself differently enables a different conversation—from technology provider to solutions partner.
The panel offered specific advice around how to do this:
- Become involved in all strategic initiatives. Work to expand beyond the IT lane, proving that you can go beyond this function and that you’re bought into the executive leadership structure and strategy.
- Learn from your peers and vendors. Understand that you need to be vulnerable and willing to learn from everyone. Share the skills and experiences you have and learn from others who have different skill sets.
- Learn from other organizations. Healthcare CIOs need to spend more time getting involved in meetings/associations in other industries. Our panel members mentioned learning from mattress factories in Japan, American Airlines, construction equipment companies, and overnight delivery services, among others. Once you see how other industries operate, figure out how to emulate that in healthcare. Think in analogies and always keep learning.
- Become a business partner to your C-Suite peers. The role of CIO is now expanding to Chief Information and Innovation/Data/Digital officer. Your peers should come to you for advice; a CIO is now also a clinical/business/research partner, helping to develop models that allow every function to be more innovative and work more effectively.
- Say “No.” A lot. Everyone wants to do the right thing. The problem is that not everyone’s “right thing” aligns with the organization’s wants and needs. That’s why saying “no” is important: resources are finite, and we want to make the most difference for the organization and our patients and their families.
- Be happy with incremental change.Ask yourself Do we suck less than we did yesterday? Daily progress adds up over time. Build IT systems so that forward motion within your organization becomes organic. Ultimately, that’s the system we’re trying to build: one that can operate without us in our role.
- Don’t be distracted by the “buzzword du jour.” Align to support the strategic plan, focusing primarily on good governance. All the folks who want to hear “yes” from us need to be as transparent as we are. Get them to the table and have them explain what they want and why it’s important to them; then determine as a group if that request is in alignment. Also, make sure to leave some room in the financial/resource plan for unexpected “pop ups” since there will always be issues you need to deal with in the moment.
- Focus on your people skills as a leader. Just because you’re the CIO doesn’t make you the best or most important on the team. If you’re nurturing your team members, you’ll succeed when they succeed. Recruiting, retaining, and motivating a diverse and inclusive workforce is key to this success.
- As always, make sure the trains run on time. We need to be grounded in operations and make sure we’re operationally sound or we’ll have no credibility in strategic conversations.
- Prepare yourself to be evangelists of change. In 2005, Mayo Clinic invited a futurist to speak. He noted that in the 12 years between 1998 and 2010, our society saw as much change as in the previous 100 years. From 2010 to 2016, in just six years we saw another 100 years of change. From 2016 to 2019, the equivalent of another 100 years. And then (as we now know to be true), he predicted that by 2022 change will be continuous. We know in our role that working with this change is going to be a continual challenge, but it’s a ride that all of us—our peers, our teams, and our society—will benefit from. What a wonderful opportunity!
About Mark VanderKlipp
Mark VanderKlipp, is an experience and systems designer, facilitator, and writer with more than 35 years of experience working in human-centered graphic design. He’s passionate about using design to elevate the voices of those with the least amount of power in a given system and incorporating human-centered design into every client interaction so that staff, leadership, and customers can have the best possible experience—however they define it.
