If last quarter’s health IT theme was that the hard part of AI isn’t the technology, this quarter’s was that someone has to pay for it — and hospital CIOs started acting like it.
From July through September, the leaders running health systems’ digital strategies lined up legacy applications for retirement, rationed AI tokens and set kill criteria for pilots. Here are the most interesting things CIOs told Becker’s about in the past three months:
1. WMCHealth’s Leo Bodden on retiring 88 applications. The senior vice president and CIO of Valhalla, N.Y.-based Westchester Medical Center Health Network said its Epic implementation, slated to go live Dec. 4, 2027, will displace 88 applications the nine-hospital network has accumulated over years of growth: “Towards the tail end of 2028, our Epic cost will be significantly lower than our current costs.”
2. NewYork-Presbyterian’s Chif Umejei measures AI ROI in a single patient. Asked for a project’s return on investment during a Sept. 16 panel at Becker’s IT + Revenue Cycle Conference, the New York City-based system’s CIO pointed to an EKG algorithm built with Columbia University cardiologists that flagged a patient’s undiagnosed structural heart disease. The patient went on to have a viable heart transplant, he said. “We could talk about dollars, cents all the time,” Mr. Umejei said, “but we had a meaningful impact in that person’s life.”
3. Jefferson Health’s Luis Taveras, PhD, puts AI access on a ladder. After one employee used Anthropic’s Cowork to complete what he called “two weeks’ worth of work in four hours” for $75 in tokens, the executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Philadelphia-based Jefferson Health described a tiered model that steers routine questions to Google and reserves token-billed frontier models for employees who need them. “But if he does that every day, the number is going to get pretty high,” Dr. Taveras said.
4. Corewell Health’s Jason Joseph gets 25 Epic developers on a day’s notice. When preparations to move the system’s health plan onto Epic hit snags, the EHR vendor “literally flew out and engaged 25 developers,” some of whom worked through the weekend, the chief digital and information officer of Corewell, which has dual headquarters in Grand Rapids and Southfield, Mich., said. “I’ve never, ever in my life seen a vendor that responsive,” Mr. Joseph said.
5. Advocate Health’s Bobbie Byrne, MD, warns “zero day” is becoming “zero hour.” The executive vice president and CIO of Charlotte, N.C.-based Advocate Health argued during the opening keynote of Becker’s fall health IT conference that AI will raise the total cost of healthcare, and predicted cybersecurity will dominate the landscape a year from now as attackers gain AI-driven tools. “Zero day is not going to be zero day,” Dr. Byrne said. “It’s going to be zero hour.”
6. Yale New Haven Health’s Lee Schwamm, MD, makes pilot sponsors pay. The senior vice president and chief digital health officer of Yale New Haven (Conn.) Health said the system now requires funding promises before an AI project is even considered: “We’re not evaluating launching a pilot unless the executive sponsor commits to paying for it if it’s successful.”
7. Northwestern Medicine’s Doug King sets a pilot’s kill criteria before launch. The senior vice president and chief digital information officer of Chicago-based Northwestern Medicine said the system agrees on success metrics before deployment and shuts down pilots that miss them rather than granting open-ended extensions: “We can always revisit it. But for that pilot, there’s 10 more that are waiting in line.”
8. Baptist Health’s Aaron Miri, DHA, hits a perfect 10. The executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Jacksonville, Fla.-based Baptist Health explained how the system became the first in the history of Epic’s Gold Stars program to earn a perfect 10 for usage, leaning on in-house clinical informatics staff rather than outside consultants. “It took several years [of] focused dedication to build a team and build trust side by side in the trenches,” Dr. Miri said.
9. Valleywise Health’s Stephanie Hines runs IT like a basketball practice. Borrowing the fundamentals-first “40 minutes of hell” philosophy of legendary former Arkansas Razorbacks coach Nolan Richardson, the senior vice president and CIO of the Phoenix-based public safety-net system drilled her team on execution and earned Valleywise its first Epic honor roll designation. “Coming into the organization, the idea of being an honor roll organization as a safety net was pretty much dismissed,” Ms. Hines said.
10. Mahaska Health’s Bob Berbeco hands AI to a nurse practitioner. The CIO of the Oskaloosa, Iowa-based critical access hospital halted its bolt-on AI pilots, formed an AI center of excellence and put a nurse practitioner in charge of building an in-house AI system focused on denial reduction and coding support. “Some leaders would put him in that box and say, this is only someone who does clinical stuff,” Mr. Berbeco said.
11. Duke Health’s Jeffrey Ferranti, MD, builds what vendors didn’t. The chief digital officer of Durham, N.C.-based Duke Health said the system developed Scout, an AI solution inside Epic that summarizes a patient’s entire record in one to three minutes, and took it enterprisewide in July. A randomized controlled trial, still in preprint and not yet peer-reviewed, found clinicians completed tasks roughly 40% faster with the application, he said. “There were no tools in the market that could do this. There were no partners that were working on this, and we decided to build it ourselves,” Dr. Ferranti said.
12. Hackensack Meridian Health’s Joel Klein, MD, on earning the nation’s first AI certification. The executive vice president and chief digital and information officer of Edison, N.J.-based Hackensack Meridian Health detailed the multidisciplinary governance that made it the first health network to earn The Joint Commission’s Responsible Use of AI in Healthcare Certification. “If we just deploy something because of the perceived urgency, eventually you’re going to make a big mistake,” Dr. Klein said.
If you would like to be added to this or a future list, please email gbruce@beckershealthcare.com.
