[00:00:04] Speaker A: Welcome to Health Data Talks, where industry experts offer bite sized tips and trends for managing legacy data.
[00:00:15] Speaker B: In a recent Health Data Talks episode on harmony healthcare it's 20th anniversary, chairman of the Board Tom Liddell shares reflections on the company's journey and how healthcare data management has evolved over time.
One theme that came up and how it deserved its own spotlight was the changing role of the healthcare cio.
We wanted to pull this portion of the conversation out and share it on its own because Tom's perspective spans two decades of working alongside CIOs as their role has shifted from operational support to strategic leadership. Here's Tom's take on how that evolution happened and why the CIO role matters more, more than ever today.
Tom, you've worked alongside healthcare CIOs since Harmony's earliest days. Take us back to what that role looked like 20 years ago and what CIOs were focused on then, the challenges they were facing and how you've seen that role evolve into what it is today.
[00:01:12] Speaker C: Fair, fair, fair question, Fair thought.
[00:01:15] Speaker D: Yeah. So my hair wasn't gray and in all of that and I was still a young whippersnapper.
[00:01:21] Speaker C: But if you think about it, just even the evolution of they'd often call it the data systems director or the
[00:01:29] Speaker D: computer coordinator for that and often that role was tucked under finance. And so it might have been more in the 80s and 90s evolve that where there would be a director of things like information systems that started to emerge again.
[00:01:48] Speaker C: Most times it was tied into the
[00:01:50] Speaker D: financial side of the organization because I think it was largely thought of as cost to an organization, not necessarily what it's evolved to today, which is strategy. So let's move that role out from under finance and let's call it a VP of technology or a vice president of information systems and then evolve that to what's called a chief Information officer today.
So kind of parallels to that, I
[00:02:16] Speaker C: think when you talk about the market
[00:02:18] Speaker D: concept that we had and when we sat down and talked to that director or that, you know, that burgeoning or early vice president, information systems, we largely were looked at as this, oh gosh, I've got all this baggage laying around, you know, in buildings and cabinets and data centers and yeah, it's okay that people are logging into nine different things and having to remember passwords before security, you know, really became a bigger, a bigger thing than it's, you know, that it's, that it is today.
You know, for that, Ed, we moved
[00:02:52] Speaker C: to where we said we got to make a market and help help people
[00:02:56] Speaker D: understand and build those concepts out.
[00:02:59] Speaker C: And we did that.
[00:03:00] Speaker D: We did that starting in 1120, 10, 1112, to where it is today, which is an understood part of technology.
[00:03:11] Speaker C: When we think of the CIO today, I think it is one of the most critical roles executed well on behalf
[00:03:20] Speaker D: of the health system that could even conceptually exist. And I mean that with most sincerity.
[00:03:27] Speaker C: They are the intersection of finance and compute and human interaction and aspiration and just conceptual things that they often might not have the answer to or might not even be able to think it, or have a vision that they can bring people to that says we are
[00:03:50] Speaker D: here today, and we are here today
[00:03:52] Speaker C: with these economics or these points of data. And it could take us to other places that evolve.
Candidly, the care and the support that organizations need to do what is amazing, amazing technology.
It is genome to robotic equipment like a da Vinci, down to pathology, over to blood science, or over to combinational therapies, all of which sits at the intersection of data and compute.
Everything we do has compute and has that associated with it.
Our lives are that. So that reflection of that cio, that responsibility that they have is enormous.
And the great ones that continue to evolve today, my hat is off to them because they're extraordinary in their care for people as well as in their ability to catalyze people to want to
[00:05:00] Speaker D: go and to aspire to do other great things.
[00:05:07] Speaker A: That's it for this session of Health Data Talks. Check out helpful
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