Rob Allen doesn’t pretend the pace of change is easy. As president and CEO of Intermountain Health — a six-state system headquartered in Salt Lake City with 34 hospitals, more than 400 clinics, and an insurance arm covering more than 1.1 million lives — he has spent the past several years making a deliberate bet on clarity over comprehensiveness. The organizational thesis is simple: two strategic initiatives, simplification and proactive care, and every resource deployed in service of one or the other.
“When all of these things come, and you have people, in essence, lined up saying, ‘I can do this for you, I can do that for you,’ you have to say no to certain things,” Mr. Allen said in a recent Becker’s Healthcare podcast interview. “It may be a great idea, and you may want to come back and do it later. But right now, these are the things we’re focused on.”
That discipline was tested in September 2025, when Intermountain executed the largest single-site Epic launch in Epic’s history — migrating the majority of its system from multiple platforms in a single go-live. The decision to do it all at once was not instinctive. Mr. Allen had lived through Intermountain’s initial EHR rollout, which launched in phases, and encountered significant difficulties that required a pause and ultimately took years to complete across the system. He was, by his own account, anxious about repeating any version of that experience at a larger scale.
“I had to work through in my own mind: why would we do it all at once?” he said. “When we looked at the disruption of not doing it all at once, that was really the turning point for me. Do we want another three-year journey of a transition? You’ve got some people who are on it, some people who are off of it. You’ve got staff who actually work between facilities — they’ll go to one and be on the new program, they’ll go to another and be on the old program. The patient records weren’t connected. It just became apparent that if it was feasible to do it all at once, it was much better to do it all at once.”
The launch went well, though certain build areas are still being completed and that the organization is still in a polishing phase. More unexpectedly, the transition surfaced an insight he hadn’t anticipated: the role of professional identity in technology change.
During rounding visits in the weeks after go-live, a member of the leadership team approached a nurse at a unit desk who, by all visible signs, was distressed. When asked how the transition was going, the nurse broke into tears. After a moment to compose herself, she explained what had happened.
“She said, ‘I have been the expert on our EHR and now he’ — and she pointed to a young man on the unit — ‘knows more about the new system than I do.’ It was her identity. I think in this process, we also have to recognize that when change comes, there is a shift sometimes in people’s identity, how they identify themselves in the ecosystem,” Mr. Allen said. “That was an area that we didn’t pay enough attention to.”
The lesson has shaped how Intermountain thinks about future technology investments. Mr. Allen’s measure of success is not a metric on a dashboard — it’s a conversation. If a caregiver or patient can articulate in their own words what is different and better, the investment succeeded. If they can’t, it failed regardless of what the implementation report says.
Beyond the EHR transition, Intermountain is now implementing a variety of AI initiatives. Mr. Allen is bullish on AI but precise about where the guardrails belong. Ambient dictation is already deployed and showing early impact. He sees the administrative burden reduction promise of AI as directly connected to Intermountain’s caregivers’ original motivation for entering medicine.
“When we look at this change, the AI tools, the technology, the general industry environment changing — how do we set a vision to the next place that helps them do that better?” Mr. Allen said. “What I love about the promise of the technology is that it will enhance our ability to streamline the work process, and particularly the administrative side. Let’s take that burden off of our clinicians. Let’s let them do what they got into medicine to do and find the joy in their journey again.”
On back-office functions, Intermountain is prepared to move aggressively. On clinical, patient-facing AI, the pace is more deliberate.
“If it’s back-office function, we want to run as hard as we can,” Mr. Allen said. “If it’s clinical patient touching, we want to make sure we’re doing that hand in hand with our clinicians and making sure the right guardrails are there.”
Perhaps the most distinctive element of Allen’s leadership philosophy is a long view on uncertainty itself, which he traces not to a management framework but to a personal moment. When his wife was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis roughly a decade ago, she was processing the diagnosis with her mother and said that life suddenly felt so uncertain. Her mother’s response stopped her: “Becky, it always has been.”
“That statement and that perspective suddenly changed the journey for my wife in a dramatic way, and it impacted my journey with her as well,” Mr. Allen said. “She could go back to life as she knew it when she realized she was living at a time when she thought everything was stable, when in reality, it’s always been uncertain.”
He connects that perspective directly to Intermountain’s institutional history — a system founded in 1975 when The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints gifted 15 hospitals across Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming to the community with a single charge: be a model health system. Through the SCL Health merger, that history now includes the Sisters of Charity of Leavenworth, who arrived in Kansas in 1858 with almost no resources and proceeded to build hospitals in mining towns across the West.
“I don’t know any era that’s had more challenge than those sisters had in doing what they did,” Mr. Allen said. “We can certainly tackle our challenges today, and they should be inspirations in this process.”
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