Week 1

By Rachel Liao:

What type of person is right for the position of CIO?  I thought this exercise was excellent for us to consider the criteria for making a recommendation on selection of a CIO from a group of candidates.  Our class was rather split on which of the four candidates in the Moyen Sante Medical Center case should be hired.  Team Jefferson decided that Sarah Janes, the Internist, Director of Medical Informatics at University of Hawaii, and head of the Association of Medical Information Systems Taskforce on HL7 Standards, was the best candidate based on the information we were presented with.  Here are my additional thoughts:

My first thought was that we need to ask some additional questions and dig deeper into the information systems (IS) needs of the organization and the IS strategy of the organization over the near horizon.  Other questions that need to be answered before we can develop a more robust and applicable set of criteria for evaluation of candidates include: how much money is in the budget for salary?  How much money is budgeted for IS needs of the organization-- IS implementations are massive investments?  What are the IT challenges that MSMC has been facing?  Is building a business intelligence capabilities a top priority?  The C-suite needs to determine who the new CIO will report to and who will report to him/her.

As our class continued to discuss our recommendations, I began to consider other important points.  Points of the discussion I particularly liked were: 1. CIO's often come from other industries, and 2. The average tenure of a CIO being only 5 years.  The last day of my internship, I sat down with the CIO of Seattle Children's Hospital, Jeff Brown, who shared his thoughts and experiences at both Children's and other hospitals beforehand.  Jeff has an extremely varied background of experiences in both healthcare and non-healthcare settings and has an MBA.  He has led successful EMR implementations at multiple healthcare organizations prior to this position.  Jeff stresses that to be a successful CIO today, you absolutely must understand the business and that you will not succeed if you only hold technical IT skills like you could have a few decades ago.  When I thought about what Jeff had told me, I understood why Dave chose Larry as being the most well-qualified candidate, realizing that Larry Bollinger might have the better skill set for the job, even though he does not have a healthcare background.  He certainly has the financial know-how and experience in running an IT shop-- and much more.  However, at the end of the day, implementation of a new IS system will require considerable skill in change management.