Ryan Smith, who stepped into the role of chief digital and information officer at Salt Lake City-based Intermountain Health in early 2025 told Becker’s that the health system is working on developing a three-year strategic plan around digital technology, analytics and data.
“I’m really excited to bring it forward,” he said. “It’s still in progress, but coming along.”
Additionally, the health system is consolidating eight EHR systems into a single Epic instance, a project Mr. Smith called the organization’s No. 1 priority for 2025.
“This will provide our physicians, clinicians and caregivers with a unified enterprise health record and billing system, which is a key enabler of our ‘One Intermountain’ philosophy and operating model,” he said. ” It will be crucial for enhancing patient safety and improving both the patient and caregiver experience.”
Intermountain announced the switch to Epic in 2023.
Beyond the EHR consolidation, Intermountain is also modernizing its enterprise resource planning system with a shift to Workday.
“We’re moving from multiple legacy ERP systems to a single Workday instance across HR, finance and supply chain functions,” Mr. Smith said. “While the go-live isn’t happening this year, we’re deep into implementation planning and execution. We intentionally staggered this transition with our Epic go-live, which is set for the fall, and we expect the full Workday migration to be completed in the first half of 2026.”
In addition to these system consolidations, Intermountain is doubling down on AI innovation.
“We’ve established an AI governance council with senior leaders across different functions, supported by subcommittees of subject matter experts. This governance process ensures we bring AI capabilities into the organization in a methodical, well-structured way, prioritizing accountability, transparency, model reliability, ethical considerations, equity, privacy and security,” Mr. Smith said. “It’s a balanced framework that allows us to move quickly while ensuring proper oversight.”
To ensure responsible and effective AI adoption, Intermountain evaluates projects based on two key factors: overall impact on the organization and implementation complexity.
“High-impact, low-complexity projects are our sweet spot,” Mr. Smith said. “Our digital and AI efforts span areas like robotic process automation, physical robotics, machine learning, generative AI and natural language processing.”
To date, the health system’s teams have implemented more than 4,000 automations.
“We track their cost, value and success. Projects that don’t deliver value are phased out quickly, while successful ones are scaled up for enterprise deployment,” Mr Smith said. “We’ve also embedded a value realization process to track the effectiveness, cost and overall impact of these digital and AI capabilities.”