The professional journey of Michael Ash, MD, has taken him from EHR vendor Cerner to a health system IT executive to, now, the CEO of Omaha-based Nebraska Medicine.
It’s a unique career path that has given him distinct insights into how healthcare works from both the vendor and provider standpoints, from both IT and operations.
“Right now, any CEO is looking at: What are those headwinds? What are certain tailwinds they can take advantage of? What’s the role of AI? What’s the role of technology? So I think it’s helped better equip me for this chair,” Dr. Ash told Beckers.
While a medical resident, Dr. Ash worked for an IT startup that developed an early mobile EHR platform that went on to become PatientKeeper. He later entered private practice in a small town for loan forgiveness. His organization offered to pay for MBA courses; one of the instructors was the chief medical officer of Cerner (now known as Oracle Health), who recruited Dr. Ash to the company.
Dr. Ash started at Cerner in 2003 as a physician executive before working his way up to chief medical officer and vice president of physician strategy. He departed in 2014 to rejoin the provider side of healthcare, when Nebraska Medicine hired him as senior vice president and chief transformation officer to oversee IT and quality and safety. He later became an executive vice president, COO, president and COO, before taking over as CEO in July.
The IT experience prepared Dr. Ash well for leading Nebraska Medicine, he said.
“In information technology, you learn ‘people, process, technology,’ in that order, every single time,” he said. “So being involved, not only in the IT aspect of the implementation of the technology, but also being over quality and safety … really helped me become a much better chief operating officer. It gave me a clearer understanding of how technology can support our strategies and how we can leverage it to reduce costs.”
He cited Nebraska Medicine’s partnership with AI giant Palantir, which helped save the health system over $40 million during the most recent fiscal year, adding the capacity equivalent of 37 patients to its average daily census through reduced lengths of stay and better post-acute placement. Nebraska Medicine started working with Palantir in January 2024 before signing a five-year, multimillion-dollar deal with the company that September.
“There were not a lot of people a year and a half ago making big bets on AI, and we made a very large bet by going with Palantir,” Dr. Ash said.
Leading at a growth company like Cerner — the company expanded roughly fivefold in his time there (Oracle bought it in 2022 for $28.4 billion) — helped give Dr. Ash a “fail-fast” mindset he brought to healthcare. “When you work for a Fortune 500 company, you have a greater appreciation that you can take big bets, but you also can abandon things quickly,” he said.
He pointed to Nebraska Medicine’s 17-bed “innovation design unit” that is testing new technologies to be scaled at the health system’s upcoming $2.2 billion hospital campus.
Other health system chief executives have backgrounds in IT or digital innovation, including Suresh Gunasekaran, president and CEO of San Francisco-based UCSF Health; Michelle Conger, president (and future CEO) of Peoria, Ill.-based OSF HealthCare; and Eduardo Conrado, president (and future CEO) of St. Louis-based Ascension. But Dr. Ash may be the first who was previously employed by an EHR vendor.
“I’m looking forward to meeting a lot more CEOs in the coming months and years, but as of right now, I don’t know of any,” he said.
He expects to see more health system CEOs come from IT in the years to come, particularly what he called “CIO 2.0s” — those with experience in digital transformation and clinical operations.
“IT systems, in particular over the last decade, have become way more complex and much more integrated into operations,” he said. “So I think you will find IT leaders who actually have a lot more operational experience.”
Even though Dr. Ash worked for Cerner, his current employer — like most academic medical centers — uses Epic (it has since 2009). But that doesn’t mean he waits for EHR innovation. Instead of biding its time for Epic’s next update for automated appeals letters, Nebraska Medicine collaborated with Palantir to build a similar application in 90 minutes. “Speed to execution matters,” Dr. Ash said.
Nebraska Medicine has also implemented Microsoft’s Dragon Copilot for ambient AI clinical documentation and switched from DynaMed to Wolters Kluwer’s UpToDate for clinical decision support, he said.
“How people are interacting with the EHR has changed a little bit in the last year or so,” he said. “There’s the potential for it to change a lot in the coming years. Not only is Epic becoming much more advanced, but these other tools are equally changing the way people interact with systems.”
Dr. Ash looks forward to the future of healthcare innovation even as he harks back to his experience at Cerner with fondness.
“I’m very appreciative of my time at Cerner. I worked with amazing individuals who cared a great deal about transforming healthcare and helped with skill development,” he said. “But it’s incredibly rewarding to see the direct impact of your life’s work. And so there’s nothing more rewarding than being in a care environment where people are not only caring for the patient in front of them, but working on breakthroughs and treatments that will help people in the future. So I’m incredibly blessed and incredibly grateful for all of the different experiences I’ve had, and very lucky to be in this position.”
