Health system CIOs have spent the past several years building AI programs around clinicians. Governance committees, intake dashboards, open office hours, ambient tools — the clinical side of the house has been the primary beneficiary of digital investment. For Donna Roach, chief digital and information officer at University of Utah Health in Salt Lake City, the realization that finance teams had been effectively left out arrived later than she expected.
“I probably have neglected my finance partners a little bit too much,” Ms. Roach said.
When rolling out AI tools, the contrast between clinical and finance teams was stark.
“My clinicians were like, give it to me, quick, quick, quick,” she said. “But some of the finance people are like, pump the brakes.”
University of Utah Health has developed an AI program deeply embedded in the organization’s operations. The health system runs open office hours for AI questions, maintains a full intake process, and tracks use cases through a dashboard showing where each initiative sits in the pipeline and what value metrics it is producing. As of the start of 2026, the system had approximately 70 use cases in development, with about 20 operational.
Less AI visibility was reaching finance. Ms. Roach said she noticed that finance staff were not attending the open office hours the health system had established. She decided to hold targeted sessions for them.
“I thought, oh, this will be easy. Let’s just set up open office hours for my finance people,” she said. “I was on the first one, the kickoff for it, and talk about crickets. Not because they didn’t want to try it, they didn’t know how to use it. It just wasn’t obvious to them.”
The moment that clarified the size of the gap came from a senior leader in the organization. The executive described a planned hire of seven people to process spreadsheets manually.
“We were like, ‘Oh wait — that’s a great use case for AI,'” Ms. Roach said. “He was like, ‘Really? How would I do that?'”
The exchange pointed to something broader than a skills gap. Finance teams, Ms. Roach noted, have a different relationship with technology than clinical teams do and understanding that history matters for any CIO trying to close the divide. Healthcare IT began in the financial side of the house, built to automate billing and claims processing, and finance teams are adopting AI at their own pace.
“If you know the history of IT and healthcare, it started out in the financial side,” she said. “We automated and created systems to drop a bill, and there’s a lot of focus on doing that perfectly. The pendulum has swung to the other side and we do that really well now. So now it’s kind of like, okay, readjust.”
Ms. Roach said the solution required stepping back and taking a more foundational approach with the finance group to introduce AI concepts. A controller on the health system side who was already engaged with AI helped drive some of those conversations from within the finance team.
Luis Taveras, chief digital and information officer at Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health, has taken a parallel path. At Jefferson, he hired a senior vice president specifically focused on AI — an emergency physician who came from the consulting world with a background in clinical operations, not technology, to bridge any gaps between the departments.
Both leaders described education as the primary lever for closing the gap. Mr. Taveras said Jefferson created an AI Champions network — identifying individuals in each department who had genuine enthusiasm for the technology, giving them more extensive training, and using them to carry adoption forward into their peer groups.
“AI is an organizational focus that we have to have, not an IT focus,” Mr. Taveras said. “Don’t let them say and think that it’s an IT solution, an IT tool. AI is not a tool. AI is a solution for a lot of what we need help with across the entire organization.”
